fuck yoyodyne!

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

 ~~~ in this old blue book i read: "if money's to be the measurer, man, and the 
 accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by girdling it 
 with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that 
 my vengeance will fetch a great premium  h e r e!'
   'he smites his chest,' whispered stubb, what's that for? me thinks it rings  
 most vast, but hollow.'
   'vengeance on a dumb brute!' cried starbuck, 'that simply smote thee from 
 blindest instinct! madness! to be enraged with a dumb thing, captain ahab,  
 seems blasphemous .'  
   'hark ye yet again, - the little lower layer. all visible objects, man, are 
 but as pasteboard masks. but in each event - in the living act, the undoubted 
 deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings 
 of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. if man will strike, strike 
 through the mask! how can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting 
 through the wall? to me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. 
 sometimes i think there's naught beyond. but 'tis enough. he tasks me; he heaps 
 me; i see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. 
 that inscrutable thing is chiefly what i hate; and be the white whale agent, or 
 be the white whale principle, i will wreak that hate upon him. talk to me not 
 of blasphemy, man; i'd strike the sun if it insulted me." ~~~ melville: moby 
 dick, chapter 36 ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ bad black gnosticism, i know ~~~ we must not look 
 there ~~~ the dwarves have verboten ~~~ but isn't there, however, some truth in 
 it? i can't help but feeling a strong response to this passage, which, by the 
 way, would make a great intro for a hiphop record ~~~ & i feel reminded of 
 benny profane wishing he could switch out the sun with his piss ~~~ and this 
 again makes me think of roger mexico urinating on the company's conference 
 table ~~~ helpless gestures in the verwaltete welt, sure. but your alternative 
 was, what?! ~~~ somewhere the dutchman from the land of the virgin calls 
 pynchon a dadaist ~~~ in a certain sense this is, i guess, true. just take
 the national book award celebration (me thinks, by the way, pynchon had named 
 some issues on which corey was then improvising), which certainly can be called 
 a dadaist happening.  a belated one, though. the death of true avantgarde, i've 
 suggested this here before, is, in my opinion, the inner-artistic meaning of  
 the sentence "it is too late" (gr, 3). however, this dadaist anarchism, pynchon 
 shares with lots of his characters, is the only form of resistance still  
 possible. it is nourished by borderline experiences through arts, sex, drugs,  
 and g.o.t.t. ~~~  so i don' t think that pynchon necessarily supports anarchism 
 in the form of "anarcho-syndicalism" (and this was, i guess, what terrance was 
 aiming at when he, dealing with industrial relations, said that pynchon 
 "rejects anarchism"). thomas pynchon is probably quite aware that we cannot,  
 anymore, get rid of money, law, power etc without evoking open violence and  
 war. to "muddling through" à la g8 there is, i'm afraid, no real political  
 alternative. and so i assume trp  would agree with umberto eco, who says in an 
 interview in this week's 'der spiegel' about the anti-globalizationist  
 movement: "i think they are right in their intentions but wrong in their 
 methods." thus you perhaps work something out for your local community or write 
 letters in the name of amnesty international when you want to do something good 
 for the world ~~~ with that dadaist meta-anarchism, however, it's quite 
 something else. only way to actually  l i v e  the counterforce today. the oh  
 so reasonable ("v-ernünftig", eh?) alternative is presented to us in gr: an  
 interview for the wall street journal, which, probably, sounds attractive not  
 even to our goodi-goodies dressed in white ~~~ although pynchon's dadaist  
 meta-anarchism is, in my stupid opinion, in the first place motivated by what  
 cabbalists call the breaking of the vessels, it has also political dimensions 
 ~~~ the late dixon comes to mind ~~~ & although tom has, in recent years, 
 somehow ruined his holiness with some unnecessary book blurbs ("stone  
 junction" is really such boring crap ...), his original strategy of the novels 
 being his  o n l y  public intervention appears to me still as a superb way   
 of saying "nö" to late modern society ~~~ yoyodyne is the comtemporary  
 manifestation of "the white whale principle" ~~~ and of ahab there's not only 
 something in blicero, but also in the man himself ~~~ kai frederik ~~~ so be 
 cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, while the bold harpooneer is 
 striking the whale! ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~