Tanks for the memories...

[Richard Fiero]

Mark David Tristan Brenchley wrote:
>. . .
>P.S. Re: Walter  Benjamin and the aestheticisation of politics. What does
>our Mr Pynchon think of the Futurists? Also, there is a possible
>comparison between the Futurists (yea, fascism"!and The Surrealists (yea,
>communism!), both have strong aesthetics but given the Surrealists
>strongly anit-aesthetic approach to art (through their links to Dadaism)
>it is perhaps not surprising that they sided with the Communists. I'm not
>quite sure that this idea holds up, but I'd be interested in hearing your
>thoughts.

Well, Stencil is certainly a Situationist. Consider evil 
Pokler's wife Leni, a good mouthy Commie chick.  There are a 
lot of crossovers.  Just as Mussolini belonged to a socialist 
party, Pokler unthinkingly operated on both sides for 
convenience. Now consider
"Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?" and the Extropians, the 
post-humans as opposed to say, the post-structuralists.
Unrelated to this but somehow similar is the career of Leo Szilard.
>From  "President Truman Did Not Understand," U.S. News & World 
Report, August 15, 1960, pages 68-71, we have: "In March, 1945, 
I [Leo Szilard] prepared a memorandum which was meant to be 
presented to President Roosevelt. This memorandum warned that 
the use of the bomb against the cities of Japan would start an 
atomic-arms race with Russia. . . Having read the memorandum, 
the first thing that Byrnes told us was that General Groves 
[head of the Manhattan District, which developed the A-bomb] 
had informed him that Russia had no uranium . . ."
>From
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/3.1/coverweb/porush/Demon.html
"There have been several brilliant refutations of Maxwell's 
Demon. Leo Szilard in 1929 suggested that the Demon had to 
process information in order to make his decisions, and 
suggested, in order to preserve the first and second laws (of 
conservation of energy and of entropy) that the energy 
requirement for processing this information was always greater 
than the energy stored up by sorting the molecules.
It was this observation that inspired Shannon to posit his 
formulation that all transmissions of information require a 
phsyical channel, and later to equate (along with his co-worker 
Warren Weaver, and in parallel to Norbert Wiener) the entropy 
of energy with a certain amount of information (negentropy)."