pynchon-l-digest V2 #4597
Michael Bailey
michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Dec 4 10:05:26 CST 2005
Glenn Scheper wrote:
>makes me want to think more about circumcision,
>and about the intersection of circles, orifices
>in the case of body parts and bodily circuits.
>http://www.science.uva.nl/pub/theory/illc/Dissertations/DS-2001-09.text.pdf
>Saying It with Pictures: a logical landscape of conceptual graphs (1.7 Mb)
>The most effective symbol to represent a borderline
>between zones is to draw a line. For example, a Peirce's cut,
>the representations of a negation in conceptual graphs,
>is a closed line imprisoning pieces of information
>into a negated area.
egad, 200 some pages. I haven't even fully read the 3 dispensations
you linked to on Thanksgiving yet -- however, I did peek at the
"Saying it with Pictures" pdf and before getting swept away (into a
long and enjoyable surf of Peirce, he of the "Peirce's cut" man what a
character!) did find the bit about "it is not the case that a man
entered a room" and "he took a chair" -- which, frivolously, I tried
to think of a joke that could lead up to - "a guy doesn't walk into a
bar" usw
http://members.door.net/arisbe/ has 67 definitions of "sign" culled
from Peirce's
writings, this would seem to bear on Gerontion ("signs" and "wonders")
Peirce developed a 3-based logic; also something he called
"semeiotics"; Peirce knew Venn (he of the Venn diagrams), and Peirce
came out with existential graphs, which today's computer theorists
have morphed into conceptual graphs. Peirce also made beer money
writing reviews of then-new philosophers such as Hegel, alienated
William James by dissing pragmatism in a public lecture (which James
had worked hard to set up for him and fund!), lived with and
eventually married a French gypsy, inspired Oliver Wendell Holmes's
theory of law and lots more
---------------
in practice for trying to eventually better appreciate the Slothrop
ancestry in 1,4; and maybe later to more fully appreciate the
Evacuation scene in 1,1
I'm looking at...
A semi-independent paragraph, a scene-setter, with a rapid succession
of characters and images (Penguin 34, ln 24-40)
"Pirate wonders if Mexico isn't into yet another of the thousand
dodgy intra-Allied surveillance schemes that have sprung up about
London since the Americans, and a dozen governments in exile, moved
in. In which the German curiously fades into irrelevance. Everyone
watching over his shoulder, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy
traitors, Lublin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian
shadow-ministers, ELAS Greeks stalking royalists, unrepatriable
dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fists, prayer to bring
back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished
before the first crops were in ... some dying wretchedly, nameless,
under ice-and-snow surfaces of bomb craters out in the East End not to
be found till spring, some chronically drunk or opiated for getting
through the day's reverses, most somehow losing, losing what souls
they had, less and less able to trust, seized in the game's unending
chatter, its daily self-criticism, its demands for total
attention...and what foreigner is it, exactly, that Pirate has in mind
if it isn't that stateless lascar across his own mirror-glass, that
poorest of exiles...."
"lascar" - an East Indian sailor, ultimately from Arabic "al askar" - the army
Pirate's musing that Mexico might be involved in some of the
intra-Allied surveillance is linked here with Pirate's sense of self
as a "stateless lascar" - he's developing insight into himself as he
feels a sympathy with Roger (both because of Roger's affair with
Jessica and Roger's likely affiliation with schemes having less to do
with the immediate War than with longer-term visions put on hold by
those dispossessed in the conflict - he eventually favors Russia or
America - both with their own plans for world domination, certainly -
as Roger's workout partner in "some such Byzantine exercise")
Prentice's view of the scene summarizes the workings of a number of
governments-in-exile, both ruing the sad toll of the machinations on
their participants, and counting himself among those so hurt
What would he want to turn back the clock to, if he could? His own
youth, perhaps - drawn into the machinations of Empire and even rising
in its ranks, he yet feels there is a greater birthright of goodness,
a different path
my analytical skill is slight, I feel I'm skating tangent to the holy
circle, bearing an image and a meme that stay in my mind without
adequate reason-mooring:
Pirate leaving Scorpia at Waterloo Station (named after a great defeat
or victory, depending on which side one favored) - with midgets
"running all over the station", Scorpia's "talc-white face...a blow to
his heart" ie _his_ summer anarchism perishing, and this was in 1936
(the year of the Anschluss)
and, from the seance: "The illusion of control....false....Completely.
No one can do. Things only happen...."
jody wrote:
> In our ceaseless quest for actionable intelligence we've come a long
> way since Milton Gloaming:
>
> Subjects were scanned using fMRI whilst they performed...
> http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/128/11/2597
>
> Developments Milton and goofy old Pointsman could only dream
> about.
>
love that "whilst"
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