GRGR(6) Discussion Opener

[Paul Mackin]

Might as well take a stab at a few  of these:

7) "They all talk of effectiveness, an American heresy...".  
   
   Why is effectiveness an American heresy?

>>>>Refers to the need to justify your project in terms of
its probable success. Some kind of cost/benefit analysis though I
don't think they had that term for it then. You talk effectiveness,
by the way, when you can't talk efficiency--in other words, the
method may work but isn't necessarily optimal. It's American
because the Americans were furnishing the dough and were the ones
insisting on rational justification for expenditures. Wanted bang
for the buck in later Pentagon talk.
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8) What is "Hippocratic temperment"?

>>>Wild guess: Since the first tenet of the Hippocratic Oath is "do
no harm", maybe the dogs are classified as to the likelihood they
won't turn on their masters.
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P. 76

9) "Old Brigadier Pudding can live ... it's gone, another gone, another,
   oh dear...."  
   
   What's going on in this paragraph?  We seem to go from a description 
   of Pudding to Pudding's attitude towards Pointsman, to Pudding's 
   reminscence about Pointsman's father to Pudding daydreaming about 
   Polygon Wood (a WWI battle site?).  Did Pudding serve with Pointsman's 
   father?  Who *was* the ginger-haired chap?  What's "no bleeding use"?  
   What's "gone"?

>>>>Sounds like Pudding's memory is failing, which is strange. It's the
short term memory that goes. Details of the Great War would still
be sharp. Did Pynchon not know this? Bet he does now.

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11) "Who can find his way about this lush maze of initials...?"  
    
    Indeed. Is the narrator here being rather tongue-in-cheeky-self-
    referential?  Isn't GR itself a bit of a maze of initials?

>>>>Thought is was just the alphabet soup of agencies set up for the
task of winning the war.
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P. 77

12) Why is combinatorial analysis the favorite pastime of retired army
    officers?

>>>>They sit around imagining what might have happened if the horseshoe
nail hadn't been lost. Permutations and combinations of eventualities.
Finally you get combinatorial explosion which even a computer
couldn't handle, of which Pudding had none anyway natch.
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P. 78

13) What is Pudding's "Old Testament style"?

>>>>Patriarchal???
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15) "Geza Rozsavolgyi, another refugee (and violently anti-soviet, which
    creates a certain strain with ARF)...".  
    
    Presumably ARF is pro-soviet? Why?  Because of the Pavlov connection?

>>>>>Yes
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P. 81

18) "But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power,
    if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to
    bear, might not nations live rationally?  One of the dearest post-
    war hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like
    charisma...".  
    
    Has this "postwar hope" come to be?  Couldn't tell it by American 
    politics.

>>>Preference for bureaucratic governance over that of a charismatic
chieftain. Reminds one of Berthold Brecht famous saying about the
society than needs heroes probably because that gentleman seems to be cryptically alluded to a few paragraphs earlier. 
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19) Anyone have anything to say about the MMPI and how it gives infor-
    mation different from a Rorschach test?  Structure vs. lack thereof.

Had a roommate who was getting his PhD in clinical psychology. Used
to practice Rorschachs on me. Interpretation as I recall was pretty
cut and dried, not leaving much to the imagination of the
administrator. Followed a set of rules to interpret responses.
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P. 82

20) Who is Rosie's "most famous compatriot" and what would make the staff
    "swear they've seen him crawling headfirst down the north facade"?

>>>>Bela Lugosi who played Count Dracula.

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