V.V. (8) Benny

[Dave Monroe]

And I'd only just begun seriously to consider that postal theme in
Gravity's Rainbow as well.  Submitted for your consideration ...

They have recently invented, in order to expedite communications from
the four corners of the globe, an electrical telegraph ....  Happy as we
would be to award the crwon of praise to the inventor of this postal
system, which in a quite literal sense travels on wings of lightning,
even this advancement in the art of long-distance communication remains
imperfect, being of small use to commercial interests ....  Therefore,
in order that such needs also be fulfilled, and that business
communications be accelerated and multiplied at least within the
boundaries of the civilized world, we propse a projectile or cannonball
express: an institution that, with suitably situated artillery stations
placed within firing range of each other, would discharge, from mortars
or howitzers, hollow shells, which have been stuffed full not of powder,
but letters and packages, and which could very easily be observed in
flight, and wherever they might fall, short of some morass, be retrieved
...

Kleist, Heinrich von, "Useful Inventions: Project for a Cannonball
    Postal System," An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters of Heinrich von
    Kleist, with a Selection of Essays and Anecdotes.  Ed. and trans.
    Philip B. Miller.  New York: Dutton, 1982.  245-6.

... cf. that first actual(ized) V-2 in Gravity's Rainbow.  A footnote
here, by the way, reamrks that "The idea whimsically proposed by Kleist
of shooting mail from cannons in relays was seriously attempted later in
the nineteenth century, with or without knowledge of his proposal."  See
also, again ...

Siegert, Bernhard.  Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal
    System.  Trans. Kevin Repp.  Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999.

... see esp. Chapter Nine, "The Logistics of the Poet's Dream: Kleist,"
pp. 84-94.  Many seemingly inetresting German texts referred to, if
anyone's interested, let me know, I live to bibliographize ...

And see Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater" as well, both in AADE and
in ...

Feher, Michel, et al., eds.  Fragments for a History of the Human
    Body, Part One.  New York: Zone, 1989.

... for some interesting observations on theater, marionettes (read:
automata, the inanimate), their innate grace, and that center of gravity
so important in ballistics, missile guidance as well.  There are online
texts, but my machine keeps freezing up, so ...

Note also Benny Profane's "yo-yoing," his (postal) route, perhaps?
Again, that simple harmonic motion, described as well by that sine wave,
that signal, that transmission par excellence of information theory, of
the cybernetics that pervades those Pynchonian texts.

Note as well the connections (!) betwixt telegraphy et al. and
spiritualism, in that Peter Sachsa seance sense, among other things, see
...

Sconce, Jeffrey.  Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from
    Telegraphy to Television.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000.

And, of course, the postal is no small theme these days, either ...

Derrida, Jacques.  The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and
    Beyond.  Trans. Alan Bass.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Very interesting, very good, thank you very much ...