pynchon-l-digest V2 #4597

[David Casseres]

Speaking of Roger Mexico, that's one of the names in this book that I
can't make anything out of.  Yet it's striking.

On 12/4/05, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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"
>
>