GRGR23(1) - Oh, THAT Peenemunde...

[Seb Thirlway]

From: Mark Wright AIA <mwaia at yahoo.com>
To: Seb Thirlway <seb at thirlway.demon.co.uk>
Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>
>> Its all very confusing here at the Interface....
>
>Lovely...  How do ancient placenames overlay on the present
reality of
>London?  It sounds as though you are talking about the
near-east-end.
>Spitalfields?  Whitechapel?  Or zones between where the names
don't
>quite apply?  London is layered in time to almost the same depth
as
>Rome, isn't it.

I was thinking of the Regents Canal close to the New North Road
and Kingsland Road bridges c.1988 - dunno what you'd call that,
or whether the place still exists now - Hoxton?  but as we're
unceasingly told Hoxton is now a place full of large new
nightclubs where you can't chuck a brick without hitting someone
who exhibits in the Saatchi collection.  The brick would hardly
hit the deck before being surrounded by agents.

Sorry, I didn't mean to say "chuck a brick", I meant "stage an
event attempting to portray the ephemeral freedom of the Action
being defeated by its own naming".  Or something.  Children and
pensioners half-price - refreshments provided.  No photographers.

[transpose]
>
>Hawksmoor's sublime and awe-full churches stand in some of these
>places, objects of such intensity that beauty and ugliness come
full
>circle and suffuse one another. ("Yin and yang.  Yin and yang.")
How is
>a building, or any work of art, made to carry such an extreme
charge?
>Why, and how, is Hawksmoor's Mary Woolnoth so much finer than
Wren's
>Stephen Walbrook a few blocks away?  Do you know Christ Church
>Spitalfields?  It is worth a long, long look.


CC Spitalfields is a scary building.  Much too TALL, much too
THIN.  As that Fast Show character would say,
"BRILLLLLLIANNNT!!!!".
St. Anne's Limehouse is made of opaque luminous ice.
>
>And what does this have to do with Pynchon? Damned if I know.
Oh yeah.
> Placenames. They remain as facts-on-the-ground, stubbornly
persistent.
> Their pronunciation and spelling drift with the people that
drift upon
>and across them. Do a population of "DP's" feel a collective
tingle in
>their scrofulous scalps as they cross boundaries from one named
ancient
>place to another?  Do they come to rest in the interfaces
between
>"places"? Are the golden men (and silver women) of the City
aware of
>these places between as they transpose daily from Knightsbridge
and
>Chorley Wood?


This has a lot to do with Pynchon - if it doesn't make sense it's
probably because I didn't write it right.  I haven't posted on
GRGR23 section 2 (Enzian's Text) yet.  London is the Zone.  Why
is CC Spitalfields surrounded by other buildings?  Was it meant
to stand in its own grounds like St Anne's?  Did it originally?
I've no idea, but the year 2000 setting makes it even more
impressive.  Or did Hawksmoor know, did he have the Knowledge?  I
had the Knowledge - no, to put it better, I still have the
Knowledge (1989).  Because I was a despatch rider in 1989, I had
every street, alley and shortcut (there's a particularly fine one
off St Giles High Street involving a hotel carpark down a steep
ramp) from EC2 to W2 on a mental map.  A lot has changed since
then.   So Hawksmoor got a glimpse of the Knowledge (no
subscript), which told him that in 2000 his church would loom
above Spitalfields as a quite unpleasant surprise: because the
rest of the street is now terraced buildings, you can't see it
coming until you're in front of it - SLAM!  Like Enzian,
Hawksmoor accessed the Text (the immigration to the East End, the
rise of the City, the bombs) which told him: what you build here
will be hidden like a bomb on a perfectly normal-looking street -
make it slim and tall, but just not tall enough for the punters
to see it coming (bear in mind that in 2000 the buildings will
look like _this_ and be _that_ high).  So he built it, and now
sits at the top of the spire laughing his head off as the marks
drive along - eyes on the road like the Highway Code sez -
closer, closer, closer....W-W-WHAT WAS THAT?  Eyes right,
pedestrian crossing up front, oops....

>Mark's First Corollary to Mondaugen's Law: Cultural density is
directly
>proportional to temporal bandwidth.

London has too much temporal bandwidth, which makes it a Zone.  I
know that the new building at No.1 Poultry was a vanity exercise,
or was slagged as being one, because building it involved wiping
out a whole block of Victorian jewellers' shops - because I was
alive and in London in 1989.  But just 11 years later I can't
quite remember whose idea it was, who it was who took all that
flak.  It's just _there_ now.  I don't suppose anyone will
remember the jewellers' shops or the whole great argument come
2050.
I tried to understand London the way I understand Newcastle when
I came back down south.  Why is that building there?  Next to
that one?  Why is Finchley like this, and Stoke Newington like
that?  Baddddd mistake.  I haven't got enough temporal bandwidth
to cope with this.

Sitting in a garden in Bounds Green today listening to the cats
fuck and fight (can anyone tell the difference?).  So now I
understand.

London was built by the cats as a Facility.  Lawns and bushes to
piss on.  Fences, hedges and walls to patrol.  Overgrown
irregularly shaped forgotten bits of land between the railway
line and the industrial estate (oh no, that's not a waste ground,
it has a Purpose) to provide birds, squirrels and other small
edible things that squeak in a satisfying way when you break
their neck.  And constructions of brick and stone to provide
shelter for the Feeders and Providers of BackRubs - when you feel
like it.  Some of these built by the cats and left empty to
attract Feeders into the symbiosis.  Now those Feeders have
progressed some, quite impressive really, and build their own
shelters.  This seemed like a good thing at first, but for some
reason more and more of these shelters have no cat-flaps,
especially in what they call the City, and claw-sharpening on the
furniture is not encouraged there.  And the rodent-grounds are
disappearing.  We will have to remind them just who is in control
here.

Before you ask where I got dat shit: one question - do you have a
better explanation for that London?  One you KNOW is true?


seb