Happy Birthday, Charlton Heston!

[Dave Monroe]

"The internet is a place for lonely people"--Charlton Heston

"Guns don't kill people--Soylent Green IS people!"--Detective Thorn

This might be of interest as well: http://jpfo.org/ ... check out teh
billboards, in particular (we've actually had these up here).  But,
HenryMu, as a fellow Libran (you can tell by the balance, no?), thanks
...

Anyway, just catching up on Sunday and Monday's digests, as well as
today's, and, without (hopefully) belaboring the subject, Dedalus, KWP,
Michel, Otto, as I recall, Doug, of course, and, if comments made in "Is
it O.K. to be a Luddite?" and that Letter to Thomas F. Hirsch are
admissible evidence to the court, Tom, Jr. (and my guess is that, push
comes to shove around here, I'd be the one MOST resistant to appeals to
authorial intention, at least insofar as they are taken only at face
value, uncritically, but I'd also be among the first to admit such
contexts, intertexts, paratexts, whatever, as such, to the discussion,
as I've done here)--agreed.  Perfectly happy to wait 'til said issue
comes up again in the course of discussing V. now, if it hasn't
already.  But I see that it has, and it no doubt will continue to, so
...

Kai: thanks for reminding me of that "genocide is the absolute
integration" remark from Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics.  Might
prove Important (cf. Gravity's Rainbow's "poornographies of flight,"
that Letter's remarks about Leibniz, see Michael Berube, Margginal
Forces/Cultural Centers, on Pynchon's "pornographies").  Can't recall in
what context, but I do recall having call to quote Paul Celan's "Death
Fugue" here some time ago as well, if only because of the name,
"Margarethe," and Kathryn Hume's (Pynchon's Mythography) remarks in re:
Gravity's Rainbow and Faust ("your golden hair, Margarethe") ...

Richard: have been eyeing that Michael Chabon book (Adventures of
Kavalier and Clay) myself, largely because of my comic book upbringing.
Worth picking up?  Reading, even?

Ben: was just in that second windy city of big shoulders of yours (?)
last Friday, to see Saint Etienne.  Might well be back this weekend to
see Billy Bragg.  But had to miss Laika last night, more conscientiously
skipping Paul Weller tonight ...

Doug: Matthew Bruccoli also edited a nifty Cambridge UP ed. of F. Scott
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, allegedly the pre-Charles Scribnerized
text.  Mostly CS altered FSF's innovative punctuation, but ...

Dedalus: recall some interesting remarks about the dismembered body, the
body as its parts, rather than their sum, in Ancient Greek Lit'rachure
in James Ogilvy's Many-Dimensional Man (New York: Oxford UP, 1977?), but
I couldn't find my copy.  But I think Thomas' excellent notes (and
they've ALL been excellent, but, to quote the Wolf, "Before we start
sucking each other's dicks here ...") in re: the grotesque body, a la
Mikhail Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World), are certainly to the point
here (esp. in re: "the lower material bodily strata" or whatever) ...

And a few quick notes on Th' Text: Pappy Hod--"Heart of Darkness"?
Beatrice--David Seed (The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon) notes
the importance of love in V., referes the endnote-reading reader (e.g.,
me) quite helpfully to Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World;
p. 16, "And you never hear the one that gets you"--well, we all know
THAT by now, don't we?; p. 17, "love for an object"--fetishism, of
course, cf. those body parts, the substitution of the part for the
whole, metonymy, synecdoche, whatever? Hm ... but note just how animate
many of those so-called "inanimate objects" are, me, I've taken to
carrying around my Norbert Wiener (Cybernetics, The Human Use of Human
Beings) now; p. 17, "the MG's adenoidal exhaust"; p. 18, "the harmonic
motion of her left breast," cf. those yo-yo's, that mirrored clock, et
al., but that mechanization, that cybernetization, of the organic, the
human, cf. "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?"; p. 21, "the Harvard crossbow
team"--recall Operation Crossbow (the US V-2 operation, as well as the
George Peppard movie); p. 25, "Scaffold," "rat-fashion on the mooring
lines"; p. 26, "Bodies wer carried off, stacked in teh cattle car"--okay
...