Sympathetic Magic & Cybernetics

[Mark David Tristan Brenchley]

On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, Jane Sweet wrote:

>  after Sir Thomas Moore's book, *The Style Of
> Connectedness* I just had to back and read Cybernetics. I've
> always had this obsession with Time.  Mr. Malign has
> raised the Rainbow's mysteries and magics here.

	This is in relation to GR I presume. The point about Gravity's
Rainbow, I thought, is that it describes a circle (much as the book with
its
linked first and last line of the book can be described as a parabola that
describes a circle in time), thus avoiding the trap of linearity (a circle
eventually comes to have no end and no beginning). Sort of a Rilkean idea
of Transcendence, I guess.
maybe.
Travesty


> 
> With not much interest in what I'm quite sure is a critical
> linking
> chapter (linking the Crew to Fopple, for example) of the
> novel V., 
> 
> and magic being the topic that Sir Moore, in his
> chapter "Gods of Gravity's Rainbow," talks about most 
> 
> (his thesis being that Fowler and others have read the book
> with
> pessimistic and nihilistic eyes and even minds, but that the
> book GR, the "prophetic" of Pynchon is none of that)
> 
> and the Connections are wonderful...
> 
> The Introduction to this book is right up my silly-cone
> alley and it struck
> me in that valley between the plastic humps, beneath,
> below, under nature's own puny mammalians, where lies a
> beating heart limping but not prostheticlally prophetic yet
> 
> 
> (Moore's use of E.M Forster is intriguing, but I don't know
> the books so I can't really say, and I haven't the Lion's
> nerve to
> let the Wizard give me a heart that ticks yet) 
> 
	hmmm, no doubt dealing with the cave bit in Passage To India (I'm
being harsh here, I actually quite enjoyed parts of PTI)

> his reading of film 
> 
> (lots of other excellent readings of film in GR, including
> that POMO--
> 
> Otto I agree the Law Review is almost all POMO
> critical, but all very good-- 
> 
> War and Film essay in the OCLR), 
> 
> Moore's chapters on Weber and capitalism, Character Moires,
> and science
> 
> (that's why I had to get that cybernetics, think twice
> before you vote anyone off this island boys), 
> 
> is very, very good and his book is original  and fresh, but
> the last
> chapter on the gods and magic is kinda disappointing. In any
> event, here are two essays, familiar to many here, as I
> recall we have discussed these and...well search under
> Stonehill in the archives, or on the net--Carnival and the
> picaresque.  
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/bio/prophet.html
> 
> http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/gr/bsto.html
>