In Praise of Rust

[Nikki & Scott Gardner]

S T Johnson <stj at holyrood.ed.ac.uk> wrote:

>Now I spent the weekend thinking on all this puzzlement over rust. 
>I was feeling I hadn't really understood the significance (because 
>the usual rust associations of tarnished and decaying just didn't fit). 
>Then I stumbled upon the following, which is an excerpt of a lecture 
>given by John Ruskin in 1858 entitled 'In Praise of Rust' (it is 
>to be found in The Faber Book of Science page 110):

[long quote]

This quote reminded me of Brian Stonehill's paper on TRP's premonitions of
cyberspace in GR, which I recently found on one of those Pynchon dedicated
web pages--probably the Pomona College one.  Many of you have probably read
it, but here's a piece:

QUOTE:
In the novel's ethically Manichean division between Us and Them, clearly
They are the forces of the inanimate, while the good guys are the forces of
Life. But Pynchon continually focuses on the boundary between the two, and
it dissolves beneath his scrutiny. A copious sentence on the novel's first
page conjures up the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells
of naptha
winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and
mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs,
a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust [...].

Just to begin unpacking these last phrases: coal is at the interface, an
organic mineral, and so is naptha, another once-living "fossil fuel." The
"coral-like growth," "mysteriously vital," depicts minerals behaving as if
they were vegetables. "Blind curves" and "lonely spurs" are both
anthropomorphic epithets for inanimate objects. And "maturing rust" likewise
blurs the line between Inorganic and Organic chemistry, an image that seeps
like a solvent across the inorganic/organic boundary.
END OF QUOTE

Stonehill precedes this with references to the Six Million Dollar Man and
the "skull made of metal."  I found interesting the mention of
anthropomorphic epithets, since that kind of figurative language is almost
as old as literature, but I had never considered the "boundary" between an
inanimate object and the vital substances (or words) that surround (or
describe) it quite like this before.

A quick question: where are we?  I went to Hokkaido for two weeks and
though my GR went with me it kind of got buried in my backpack under empty
film canisters and Kuril Island reclamation propaganda.





Scott Gardner in Okayama