<div dir="ltr">But even if the bananas are unambiguously good, are 100% on the side of life, they begin the procession toward death immediately. <div><br></div><div>p. 17: "Teddy Bloat's on his lunch hour, but lunch today'll be, ack, a soggy banana sandwich in wax paper."</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 1:53 PM, Smoke Teff <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:smoketeff@gmail.com" target="_blank">smoketeff@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">I like what you're saying, Laura. Maybe the scene is so <i>iconic</i> that every time I go back to it I am excited to do so, and so am applying my own positive feelings, which is predisposing me to categorize this as good loving fun. Because you're right, lots of shit that we might expect the book to view as, well, not good, makes its way into those bananas, overshadows them. But then, also, I don't know. It does seem fun. I am inclined to view it generously. Not just as a willful negation (repression, affirmation) of the death that is always at the fucking door, but as a sort of miraculous thing to occur in the universe--the miasma forming at the shithole of the world is somehow transmogrifying into life, fun, play...<div><br></div><div>Yes, it's fantasy (we see this in the way that, like fantasies, it is interrupted/burst: "The phone call, when it comes, rips easily across the room, the hangovers, the grabassing, the clatter of dishes, the shoptalk, the bitter chuckles, like a rude metal double-fart, and Pirate knows it's got to be for him."), but let's take what we can get, man. These are trying times. </div><div><br></div><div>Grabassing sounds fun; bitter chuckles sound fun. </div><div><br></div><div>But then there is a desperate surreality to axis of banana-centrism that runs through the menu. It does seem like an at-least-neurotic response. </div><div><br></div><div><div>The scent is "flowery, permeating, surprising" (10). I believe that these are all good things. Flowery seems self-explanatorily life-affirming. Permeating, given the title of this first section of the book, given the recurring motif of distance, of separation, of membrane, seems to be a good thing. Surprising--this is somewhat complicated, maybe. I don't have my Brown with me but he does say something about how the ego (in an attempt to heal itself, to re-achieve infancy) seeks novel, surprising pleasures. But how this is just one step in the process--how eventually the healed ego seeks the stasis of pleasurable repetition. I'm sure that's shoddily paraphrased. </div><div><br></div><div>p. 8: "[Pirate] knows he's already stopped believing in the rocket he saw. God has plucked it for him, out of its airless sky, like a steel banana." Maybe the banana yins the rocket's yang. If the rocket seems to be a life-destroying, unnatural thing that is made of an uncountable number of natural things, maybe the banana is the opposite. The life-affirming, natural thing that is made of an uncountable number of unnatural things.</div><div><br></div><div>"Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects...."</div><div><br></div><div>This seems unambiguously good. The scent is so expansive, the good-feeling so ebullient, it creates spontaneous generosity. The cup runneth the fuck over. </div><div><br></div><div>But then do they open the windows? Why not? Are they afraid? (Here I think of Jessica and Roger being too afraid to light a fire in their secret rendezvous point.) They sense, instinctively, that the world outside--the War, the cloud of death--would not allow this. Or maybe they feel guilty. </div><div><br></div><div>If the holocaust is always there, then do we think differently about the breakfast? Is it just gluttony?</div><div><br></div><div><div><div>Not to be a boner but I think--excited to hear you go deeper with this, Monte--this question relates to one of the book's most fundamental/persistent questions. If the book takes on the one hand a sort of broad, historical, Manichean view of things (in addition to its other--life's other--great dualisms, light v. night, nature v. artifice, aggression v. peace, love v. hate)--though of course the book is too smart, too dialectic to think dualistic thinking really tells the whole story--then how do we know how to categorize ambiguous things like 18-inch bananas grown of the city-sky's waste? Maybe the usefulness of the distinction has a limit. Maybe we need to believe death can transform into life, that play, fun, life can be--must be--achieved anywhere.</div></div></div></div></div><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 12:33 PM, David Morris <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:fqmorris@gmail.com" target="_blank">fqmorris@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">I see the whole scene as Nature's power to thrive amidst adversity, chaos and death. The intricate chemistry is a form of magic. They are sort of supernatural bananas. And the breakfast scene is a slow-moving slapstick.<span><font color="#888888"><div><br></div><div>David Morris</div></font></span></div><div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 12:27 PM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kelber@mindspring.com" target="_blank">kelber@mindspring.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div style="font-size:13px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,sans-serif">I don't see much fun in the description of the Banana breakfast - the tone is more of a surreal, desperate attempt to forget what's happening outside. It's not Pynchon who's saying fuck off, but "the high intricacy of the weaving of its [the musaceous odor] molecules.<div><br></div><div>Earlier, on the roof: "Pirate has become famous for his Banana Breakfasts … the politics of bacteria, the soils stringing of rings and chains in nets only God can tell the meshes of, having seen the fruit thrive to lengths of a foot and a half, yes, amazing but true." These are unnatural bananas, grown in the shadow of the power station and the gasworks.</div><div><br></div><div>Why the references to molecules here? They're the first of many references to organic (i.e. unnatural) chemistry. Similarly, I don't think the Adenoid appears as a random, comic incident. Pynchon isn't going to write about the holocaust directly, but it hovers in the background. At least that's how I read it.</div><div><br></div><div>LK<div><div><br><br><blockquote style="padding-left:5px;margin-left:0px;border-left:#0000ff 2px solid;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration:none;font-size:10pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif;color:black">-----Original Message-----
<br>From: Monte Davis <u></u>
<br>Sent: Mar 28, 2016 11:11 AM
<br>To: Mark Kohut <u></u>
<br>Cc: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <u></u>, pynchon -l <u></u>, kelber <u></u>
<br>Subject: Re: "Fun Was Actually Becoming Quite Subversive" (Molly Hite)
<br><br><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default">"...a wonderful breakfast... the scent alone is enough to ward of[f] death, Pynchon famously says “Fuck Death.†So by indulging in this pleasure, they are able to escape death, they are able to escape the trajectory of human nature even if just for a morning.. maybe by not denying these pleasures we might be able to get out of the arc of human nature..."</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">This is more or less how I read the banana breakfast, too: Bakhtin's carnival, Brueghel's land of Cockaigne, a celebration of excess mocking wartime austerity. Yes, it's anomalous in the novel's larger world: an island or oasis or refuge, just as the rooftop bananery is an artificial enclosure against December chill, just as its bananas are luxuries available only to these officers with connections. Still, "a spell, against falling objects" seems to me as good as it gets in that world.</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">Which is why I respectfully disagree with part of Laura's discussion last week:</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">LK> <font face="times new roman, serif">T</font><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-size:13px"><font face="times new roman, serif">he musaceous odor. Anyone who's ever taken organic chemistry (did Pynchon? Anyone know?) has probably synthesized banana ester in the lab. it's a standard lab exercise, and it's easy to know if you've got it right, by that musaceous odor ... So even when Pynchon is talking about Nature (in this case, unnaturally growing bananas), he's reminding us how easy it is for science to mimic it, or to tear apart and exploit the delicate molecules.</font><br></span><br>There are certainly many places in GR where industrial organic (and inorganic) chemical technology has an unmistakably evil, negative, anti-human or even "anti-life" context and emotional affect. BUT NOT, I mildly demur, HERE!</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">Pynchon gives us "peculiar alkaloids" in the bananery's long-composted soil... "the politics of bacteria, the soil’s stringing of rings and chains in nets only God can tell the meshes of"... "musaceous odor..." </div><div class="gmail_default">"taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules"... "genetic chains... labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations"</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">But does he, HERE, say or imply anything about artificial synthesis (as contrasted with life's proliferating variety)? Does he say anything about a "mimicked" smell as distinct from the real smell of real yummy 'nanas? Are there any "delicate" molecules being "torn apart" and "exploited" here -- other than as life has routinely, "by its nature" done so 24/7 for a few billion years before IG Farben came along? No.</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">I'm fine with Laura writing about her associations, which I believe were brought on by Pynchon's uses (above) of chemical and biological vocabulary and concepts. In fact, I share them: I've made isoamyl acetate and isopentyl acetate, too. But that's quite different from "Pynchon is reminding us" of "science" doing any such thing. In fact, I read those phrases above as integral to the unmistakably positive, celebratory "flavor" of the banana breakfast -- not as a coded warning that exploitive synthetic technology is lurking beneath. The weaving and unweaving of molecules *is*, explicitly, "a charm, against falling objects."</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">Here's a reader I respect and admire, and a stock response that runs through fifty years of Pynchonology: "Everyone knows that Pynchon mistrusts and fears and warns us about science and technology, so wherever their vocabulary and concepts crop up, he's on the attack."</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">This matters to me, as I wrote at length in the exchanges here in June of 2013: <a href="https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1306&msg=174066" target="_blank">https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1306&msg=174066</a> , etc etc etc... </div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">It leads, again and again, to systematic ignoring and misreading of positive, mixed and ambivalent  contexts and associations for P's uses of scientific and technical vocabulary, concepts, and perspectives. Fair warning: I'll be coming back to this throughout the BtZ42, and throughout GR if we continue.  </div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 5:24 AM, Mark Kohut <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mark.kohut@gmail.com" target="_blank">mark.kohut@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">"having evidently the time, in his travels among places of death, to devote to girl-chasing"---p.19 Miller edition<div><br></div><div>I believe Ms. Hite is the one who also said, when encountering the claim that the Whole Sick Crew were 'hysterical' caricatures</div><div>said: "I knew these people' IRL. </div></div><div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 4:13 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:lorentzen@hotmail.de" target="_blank">lorentzen@hotmail.de</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<small>> Molly Hite’s critical work with Pynchon published in
2004 has the title “Fun Actually Was Becoming Quite Subversive.â€
It is an interesting title, because it originated somewhere
completely different than <em>Gravity’s Rainbow</em>, in fact it
came from the 1969 trial of the Chicago Seven, a group of young
men from antiwar and revolutionary groups accused of disrupting
the 1968 Democratic Convention. This was considered a very
important trial in the counterculture movement, something Pynchon
famously embraced in his works. The exact quote originated from
the testimony of Abbie Hoffman and reads “fun was very important…
it was a direct rebuttal of the kind of ethics and morals that
were being put forth in the country to keep people working in a
rate race.†Hite uses this to introduce her interpretation of
Pynchon. She argues that “the idea of fun could subvert an
oppressive capitalist structure is central to this novel of
excess.†</small>
<p><small>           Molly Hite uses Herbert Marcuse’s 1955 culture
synthesis <em>Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry
into Freud</em> to help frame her argument, and plainly states
that this work must have influenced Pynchon. Marcuse claims that
the period of time, which this book was written in, was a period
of great productivity and excess, and with the technological
advances, it became economically feasible to have a “leisure
culture.† However with this culture of leisure comes a raising
of standards and consequently a “surplus-repression.†This is
repression is the repression of Freudian pleasures, conceding or
flat out rejecting the gratification of many desires which Freud
saw as necessary for a society to organize and survive. Marcuse
argues that by denying these pleasures principles that “advanced
civilizations are in danger from a second group of instinctive
impulses striving for death.†This, Hite states, is where we get
the dramatization of the destruction from the rocket, as it
becomes global. She argues “The V-2 Rocket rises under human
guidance..†and this is where we understand the “death drive.â€
This is the natural tendency of society, to progress to a
certain point, and then fall into the death drive; the arc of
human civilization not unlike the arc of the bomb.</small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>           Hite states that Pynchon understood Marcuse’s
possibility of escape from postindustrial destruction, and
encoded it in his book, however slight this chance might be. By
not becoming individuals we are doomed to, as individuality in <em>Gravity’s
Rainbow</em> is synonymous with disrupting the productivity
and subsequent regression of human nature. This is where the
overt sexual tones of the book come from, especially the more
risqué ones. These sexual acts are done not in hopes of
productivity, or reproducing, but simply out of pleasure. By not
denying these pleasures and becoming individual of the society,
we can escape the trajectory of destruction. Hite does
acknowledge that these chances are incredibly small, that
betrayal and self-defeating tendencies are built into the
system, that “every revolution has been a betrayed revolution.â€
So for Hite’s interpretation, humanity is at stake, the
trajectory is annihilation, and Pynchon offers a way to escape
that trajectory.</small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â I would like to agree with Hite in her
thinking. In the very beginning of the novel, we are introduced
with a very dark image of the concentration camp, with people
being ushered into a bleak hotel. At that hotel, they wait
quietly for the bomb to drop without any hope left. Right after
we get that dark image, we are given one of the most colorful
scenes in the novel, the banana breakfast. After a night of
indulging in alcohol to excess, Pirate wakes up and picks
bananas, something that was rationed during the time period. He
then begins to cook a wonderful breakfast consisting of banana
everything, and the scent alone is enough to ward of death,
Pynchon famously says “Fuck Death.†So by indulging in this
pleasure, they are able to escape death, they are able to escape
the trajectory of human nature even just for a morning. I
believe scenes like this are a clear road map that Pynchon gives
us, that maybe by not denying these pleasures we might be able
to get out of the arc of human nature, or in Pynchon’s work, the
literal bomb. The chances are slim however, these people are
protected only as long as the scent of the banana breakfast
wafts over them, but the chance does exist.   <br>
</small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>Â </small></p>
<small> </small>
<p><small>Hite, Molly, “‘Fun Was Actually Becoming Quite
Subversive’: Herbert Marcuse, the Yippies, and the Value System
of Gravity’s Rainbow,†Contemporary Literature 51.4 (Winter
2010): 677-702. <<br>
</small></p>
<small> </small>
<div><small> </small></div>
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<a href="https://englit0500.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/fun-actually-was-actually-becoming-subversive/" target="_blank">https://englit0500.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/fun-actually-was-actually-becoming-subversive/</a><br>
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Pynchon-l / <a href="http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l" target="_blank">http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l</a>
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