New Pynchon Book Theory

[Sean Mannion]

"There are some grandiose amplifications here for Pynchon to work with, not 
to mention
the patent(ed) absurdity of early experimental cars, planes, etc. The more I 
think about this the more it seems like a Pynchon book, but I'm done 
thinking about it for a while.  Anybody else have thoughts on this?"

This would very much into the zeitgeist again for Pynchon. I'm thinking very 
much of those "subtextual motivations" and climate issues, but also further 
into the alarming rabbit-hole realm of resource depletion, peak-oil and it's 
role in the current geopolitical state of affairs, and generally speaking 
the absolutely collossal sense of hubris and equally collossal awakening 
that will shortly accompany it.

Entropy, Apocalypse, Fascism, Paranoia. It's all there, all familiar ground, 
and it wouldn't surpise me that Pynchon would take all of it on. Very 
Prescient.

I won't take the opportunity to harp on about the Peak Oil angle here 
because it's a can of worms that gets the 'best filed under Cassandra' 
treatment and has the capacity to start flame-wars. The theory, its reality, 
and its implications for most of us are all in plain view, and easily found 
out there on the old world-wide-web.

Needless to say, if Pynchon's newest follows the line of your theory, Nick, 
It wouldn't surprise me if these kinda things showed up somewhere in the new 
book, especially given the Pynchon canon to date.


Sean









>From: "nick gardner" <horseycraze1 at gmail.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: New Pynchon Book Theory
>Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 06:04:33 -0500
>
>I have heard that the new book will be set around or in 1897 in
>Chicago.  It's not a very obvious timeframe for much, least of all for
>Sofia Kovalevskaya, who died years earlier in Europe, or the serial
>killer thing, although, who knows maybe he could still fit it in.  I'm
>assuming that even if the book is set in 1897, that flashbacks
>included could subsume quite a range of events, including the serial
>killer thing, world fair of religions thing, etc.
>  I had the idea that this new book might be about cars.  It may be a
>stretch, but humor me.  An article detailing an 1895 race in Chicago
>referred to it as the "race of the century," one of the first versions
>of motorcar racing (or, as in 1895 the cars were called "motocycles")
>which was a major turning point in, at least Chicago, the fate of the
>automobile.
>Karl Benz invented the carburetor, speed regulation system,
>accelorator, ignition, battery, spark plug, clutch, gear shift and
>radiator.  It was the Germans, particularly Siegried Marcus, Gottlieb
>Daimler, and Karl Benz who made the most signifigant acheivements
>toward creating the automobile between 1890-1900, forshadowing German
>rocket scientists by half a century.  It is also possible that the car
>would be a link to back to Kovalevskaya, who was active in Germany as
>a mathematician at the same time.  Might her ideas, the most important
>ones of which were about mechanics, or her masterpiece work concerning
>the mathematics of a wheel rotating around a fixed point, have
>something to do with the lofty ideas of other German mechanics at that
>time?
>     Many automobiles were mocked as being ridiculous by people
>through the 1890s.  And they topped out at about 11 miles per hour, so
>that seems like fair, justifiable mockery.  By 1905 however,
>autombiles were being produced on a grand scale and the first major
>era, the brass era, of cars were created.  What happened in between?
>What did the face of the automobile look like when Americans fell in
>love with it for the first time?  How did cars come from nowhere to
>fifty years later entitling the "beat" generation to being On the
>Road, to a worldwide problem of air pollution which may be the biggest
>environmental threat to our planet, not to mention the subtextual
>motivations for the war in Iraq and "on terror"?  There is also the
>whole collusion between car industies and the defense department
>during the war and in the years leading up to the highway commisions
>which paved America in the late forties, early fifties which Pyncon
>would be familiar with from his research on GR.  There are some
>grandiose amplifications here for Pynchon to work with, not to mention
>the patent(ed) absurdity of early experimental cars, planes, etc.
>The more I think about this the more it seems like a Pynchon book, but
>I'm done thinking about it for a while.  Anybody else have thoughts on
>this?