grgr (34): pinball wizzard?!

[bug~halo]

When I was studying chemistry at 14 we saw a film about thermodynamics, so 
I've ever had this image of entropy: atoms, depicted as balls, colliding, 
colliding, colliding, and the eventuality that the system, a "closed" 
system, will come to a standstill. But there's no slot for another quarter, 
at least not in the film.

[I was encouraged to take chemistry because of my dad; he's a scientist who 
got his undergrad degree in English, but took the science classes he needed 
to get into a Ph.D. program in pharmacology, and he was determined that his 
daughters be able to do science and math. (And oddly enough, we can.) He's 
of Pynchon's generation, the silent generation, and went to a 
fancy-schmancy east coast school, but was not to the manor born - he got a 
scholarship. I just talked to him about V., which I've just started. 
"Mary," he said, "Gravity's Rainbow is about entropy; V. is about history." 
Ok, Dad.]

The connection of yo-yo and pinball interests me, because they are bodily, 
and they are amusements, diversions. Pinball, though, you rack up points, 
and physically it's more like sex - both hands and yr hips. But with a 
yo-yo, there aren't points. You keep it going as long as you can and you 
make it beautiful. And there's a guiding hand....

mary


At Thursday 01:03 pm 8/24/00, you wrote:
>Cf. also "V" where Profane is called a human yoyo, another popular game, 
>although a yoyo is more controlled by its string than a pinball. Does this 
>mean that Profane is more strictly controlled by outside forces than the 
>characters in GR, who are bouncing around in the Zone? Just a thought, and 
>maybe something to discuss more carefully when we get to V.
>
>Thomas
>
>
>>From: Mark Wright AIA <mwaia at yahoo.com>
>>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>>Subject: Re: grgr (34): pinball wizzard?!
>>Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 06:05:41 -0700 (PDT)
>>
>>Howdy
>>I wrote:
>> > Howdy
>> >
>> > This is an old movie convention.  If an audience was to be invited to
>> > sing along with the character on screen the lyric would be subtitled
>> > and a little dot (the "bouncing ball") would hop from syllable to
>> > syllable in time with the music.  I remember it was used in old Max
>> > Fleischer cartoons dating from the 1930's, when sound in film was
>> > still
>> > a novelty and movie palaces still competed with live burlesque and
>> > vaudeville.
>> >
>> > Mark
>> >
>> > P.S. Check out all the lewd old Betty Boop cartoons you can put your
>> > sweaty hands on!!
>> >
>>
>>Or did you know this already?  I assumed a cultural gap here where
>>perhaps I shouldn't have.... Didn't mean to sound condescending. (Did
>>you note my artful use of both kinds of ellipsis, there?)
>>
>>You posed some questions which I rushed passed:
>>
>> > --- Lorentzen / Nicklaus <lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de> wrote:
>> > >                       "follow the bouncing ball:" (760)
>> > > does this, also refering back to 583, somehow suggest that the
>> > > pinball machine
>> > > is a, well, "epistemological model" for the novel?! & if so: can
>> > this
>> > > be
>> > > observed as a pop-cultural meta-framing of the text? how is gr's
>> > > pinball machine
>> > > related to the video-games in vineland?
>>
>>Certainly some of the characters behave as though they are inanimate
>>pinballs rocketing back and forth under the guidance of forces beyond
>>their comprehension.  I'm not sure you could work it up into a
>>full-fledged framing device, although it does work as a recurring
>>metaphor.  Given my automatic reading of "bouncing ball" as noted above
>>the pinball connection never occurred to me in this specific instance.
>>
>>RE: pinball/video games in "V", V2" and "Vineland" this would be an
>>interesting little study.  I suspect that P would present videogames as
>>more death-oriented and inanimate because great pinball play depends on
>>"body english," of a sort, and video games are somehow colder and more
>>disconnected.  This quite apart from their imagery which has also
>>devolved towards mayhem and dismemberment.
>>
>>Mark
>>P.S. I tried out the Star Wars "Pod Racer" game on a friend's PC last
>>weekend, and boy was it fun...
>>
>>
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