"Across the interface" (was Re: knight ridder service

[jonathan schultz]

I believe that interface was a word before it was co-opted as
jargon...according to my trusty MW Dictionay it originated in 1882.  ...2a.
the place at which indepedent and often unrelated systems meet and act on
or communicate with each other...Like the world, or any other division
between opposites man/woman-sex, night/day morning-evening,
life/death-faith, religion, psychic projection &c, &c. ad nauseam. 
According to Webster it was not until 1967 that it got adopted by the
computer folk, semiologists, the intelligentsia and redefined as 'their'
term.

Jonathan

----------
> From: rj <rjackson at mail.usyd.edu.au>
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: "Across the interface" (was Re: knight ridder service
> Date: Monday, October 04, 1999 4:44 PM
> 
> I think that Pynchon has accessed this term deliberately and
> reflexively, and he uses it in a range of guises in *GR*: Walter
> Rathenau, through a spirit medium, comments that the "interface between
> coal and steel is coal tar" (166); Slothrop and Geli Tripping's
> "Brockengespenstphanomen" is confined to "dawn's slender interface"
> (331); and the Herero Pavel, sniffing "Leunagasolin", hears "the voices
> of the Fungus Pygmies who breed in the tanks at the interface between
> fuel and water-bottom":
> 
> Not much fun for them down here at the Interface, competing with the
> bacteria who cruise by in their country of light, these cellular
> aristocracy, approaching the wall of hydrocarbons each for his share of
> God's abundance -- leaving their wastes, a green murmur, a divergently
> unstable gabbling, a slime that grows with the days thicker, mor
> epoisonous. It is a depressing bthing indeed to be a pygmy clustered
> together with thousands of others, hundreds of thousands, and have to
> live on the other side of all this. You say other side? What do you
> mean? What other side? You mean in the gasoline? (Clustered Pygmies,
> playfully and to some well-known swing riff): No-no, no no! -- You mean
> in the water, then? (C.P.:) No-no, no no! ... We mean, explain the
> Pygmies ... on the other side of the whole thing, the whole
> bacteria-hydrocarbon-waste cycle. We can see the Interface from here.
> It's a long rainbow, mostly indigo, if that's any help, indigo and Kelly
> green ... (523-4)
> 
> I suspect that there is a sociological fable buried in this
> hallucination.
> 
> Elsewhere there are the "souls across the interface" between life and
> death (147), "floundering in the swamp between the worlds" (217). Kevin
> Spectro envisaged the brain's cortex "as an interface organ, mediating
> between ... Inside and Outside ... but *part of them both*" (141); and
> it is Slothrop's cortex which, for Spectro and Pointy, is the
> "interface" which will provide the "answer" to his apparent prescience
> of the V-2 blasts (144).
> 
> I think that the notion of "interface" -- as a type of
> scientifically-observable magical realm or state -- also serves as a
> metaphorical demonstration of the process of information transmission
> from author to reader. The text is an "interface" between the author's
> experience of the "real" world and the reader's own, one across which
> Pynchon reaches with his social and cultural critiques.
> 
> best
> 
> 
> Doug Millison wrote:
> > 
> > Can't we credit TRP with introducing "interface" into literary
discourse?
> > First in a long line of information systems jargon that have taken on
> > broader metaphorical use in English for "ordinary" (by that I guess
this
> > reporter means folks other than computer industry geeks)
> > "people".