antw. Re: Pointsman's obvious point ain't so obvious

[Henry Secularpeturbations]

--- lorentzen-nicklaus
<lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de> wrote:
> 
> 
>   here pynchon was probably influenced by the
> aphorism of adorno i recently   
>   hinted you at. you may have another look --- kfl

I will have a look at it. I'm still reading Menand's
books and Parker's Melville. Nearly finished with Vol.
one and I'm excited to be getting into the Whale now
and on to Vol 2.  Too bad we lost Parker from Ishmail.
He has been very helpful off-list. Proof that a
moderated list or a managed list (as John prefers to
be called) may not work any better than a free for all
orgie like the one we have here. In fact, I've yet to
be party to list that works. Parker and Bryant are
about as big as scholars get in Melville studies,
mature, accomplished men, but they can't seem to bury
the hatchet. But, be that as it may, it's unlikely
that a discussion of Melville and "high german
metaphysics" will resume. John booted Ralph yesterday
and since there is so little interest in the topic, it
will surely die. 

Anyway, seems I'm not getting some of the messages
here. I gather that Dave Monroe was pointing out that
David Gentle and myself were not careful to
distinguish the different rockets. He's correct, of
course, but it doesn't change anything as far as the
discussion goes thus far. Would say,  I don't believe
that Pynchon has written a novel about how profits are
made from war  in the Bush administrations. Some wild
conspiracy books that read more like fictions than
history have been written about these ideas, but
Pynchon is novelist, not a muck raking pamphleteer.
Also,  the research Pynchon did, exhaustive as it may
have been, is not inserted into the novel minus
Pynchon's twists and ironies. So, while the historical
data about the attacks on London may be of use to the
reader of GR, it is of no use at all if the reader
ignores the fiction that Pynchon constructs. Pynchon's
GR is a fiction. A fairy tale. He creates the
characters, the worlds they live in. There are all
sorts of obvious historical facts and points that
Pynchon  ignores, distorts, twists, subverts, mixes
up, in short, renders ambiguous to make his fictions.
If one wants to know about rockets landing on London,
GR is not the book to read. Of course it's great to
connect and interconnect texts as Dave Monroe does and
many here do, but in the end, if one is going to say
that it's an obvious point in GR (not in history or in
fact) that the rockets are random, one need to open
the novel and not some other book to support that
assertion. The rocket in GR is very much like the
white whale. Melville, in fact, includes all sorts of
information about the whales,  heads,  ears, eyes,
tail, all very scientific, all deeply phiosophical,
all 
that cetology, but it is burlesque. Pynchon, I assume,
does the same thing here in Entropy. At least, prior
to reading his Introduction (the first tale of
Pynchon's I ever read was Entropy in a magazine, I was
asked to a critique a play called Entropy and I
decided to look in the library to find out what the
hell entropy was, I stumbled onto Pynchon) I gave him
credit for doing so. Entropy is short, all the talk of
heat and entropy and Adams and feedback and the like,
is a bit much. In any event, in Melville's hand
cetology is burlesque of the padantic
history/political pamphleteer disguised as a novelist.
Melville includes latinate scholarship. Consider all
the word we have to look up reading Entropy. Is this
guy for real? Or do these things not matter much? Is
he trying to proove he is literate? Melville piles
calssifications on classifications, tedious books on
tedious books. Anatomy, phrenology, 
linguistics, so on. But science cannot account for the
mystery of whale or the fathomless mysteries of life. 
And just when we are prepared to think that whale is
God or God's devil or planet, we are told that it only
a fish. Only a fish? Ambiguities abound! 

The same is true of the rockets in GR. 

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