Deathkingdom

[jill]

Hello,
I take out of these readings a sympathy for something rather simple:

There's no place like home. To elaborate, the stuff about the air, vacuum
and space, I think it refers to a frightening ultimate extension of living
in a self-sufficient sphere, manufacturing everything from within, cut off
our naturally occuring routes of traffic and intercourse. 

If you extend all these things you might see we are doing the same thing:
holograms, cell phones, *Tang, tv's, air conditioning, tv dinners, sperm
banks, cloning, excercise and fitness equipment, laptops and satellites,
big comfy SUV's with onboard computers. We shouldn't be surprised then if
we "learn to do without air/the earth/" Someone earlier on the list pointed
out the commodification of experiences on the Internet. I am probably
stating the obvious. Oh well.

Deathkingdom I just figure stems from the overall "entropy" leanings of
Thomas Pynchon. 

*(in the USA Tang was more popular during the 1970's a bright orange
artificial powdered drink, introduced by the Astronauts)

-jill

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> ... also, any thoughts, anybody, on this notion of "deathkingdoms"
> (V722-3/B843)?  Esp. that question, "Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be
> the moon?" and the attendant "dream of a great glass sphere," "vacuum inside and
> out" (and recall the song, "Victim in a Vacuum" (V414-5/B483)), "the colonist"
> who "have learned to do without air," why "it's understood the men won't ever
> return," why "they are all men," and why "the ways for getting back" are "so
> complicated, so at the mercy of language, that presence back on Earth is only
> temporary and never 'real'" (and why the scare quotes aroun "real")?  And so
> forth and so on ... one of the strangest, most haunting, most allusive, most
> suggestive, most just plain interesting passages in the novel, in any novel, and
> yet ... but, also, those (Protestant? Hegelian? Romanticist? And so forth ...)
> notions of exile, return, reconciliation ...
> 
> jbor wrote:
> 
> > Blicero's scathing monologue, his vision of the Deathkingdom of man