AtD--How Does it Fit

[rich]

I'm thinking within a month at the latest, the publisher would best start
distributing so reviewers have a month to read the thing in time for
publication. if it's as dense as GR, god help'em

p.s. I get the feeling electricity will be an actual character in AtD,
caressing and tormenting. we're all so insulated today from the raw power of
the thing. not so, tesla and company and the folks gaping at the exposition
in 1893. i've read definitions but I still scratch me head--what the heck is
electricity really?
__________

from current issue of NY Review of Books. interesting take on systems,
marxism, and parallels to end of 19th C today
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19302 (tony judt's review of polish
philosopher, Leszek Kolakowsk.)

"the attraction of one or another version of Marxism to intellectuals and
radical politicians in Latin America, for example, or in the Middle East,
never really faded; as a plausible account of local experience Marxism in
such places retains much of its appeal, just as it does to contemporary
anti-globalizers everywhere. The latter see in the tensions and shortcomings
of today's international capitalist economy precisely the same injustices
and opportunities that led observers of the first economic "globalization"
of the 1890s to apply Marx's critique of capitalism to new theories of
"imperialism."

And since no one else seems to have anything very convincing to offer by way
of a strategy for rectifying the inequities of modern capitalism, the field
is once again left to those with the tidiest story to tell and the angriest
prescription to offer. Recall Heine's prophetic observations about Marx and
his friends at the midpoint of the nineteenth century, in the high years of
Victorian growth and prosperity: "These revolutionary doctors and their
pitilessly determined disciples are the only men in Germany who have any
life; and it is to them, I fear, that the future
belongs."[19]<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19302#fn19>
------------------------------



... that moribund, system-building explanations of the left may indeed be
due for revival—if only as a counterpoint to the irritating overconfidence
of contemporary free-marketeers of the right—In the early years of this new
century we thus find ourselves facing two opposite and yet curiously similar
fantasies. The first fantasy, most familiar to Americans but on offer in
every advanced country, is the smug, irenic insistence by commentators,
politicians, and experts that today's policy consensus—lacking any clear
alternative—is the condition of every well-managed modern democracy and will
last indefinitely; that those who oppose it are either misinformed or else
malevolent and in either case doomed to irrelevance. The second fantasy is
the belief that Marxism has an intellectual and political future: not merely
in spite of communism's collapse but because of it. Hitherto found only at
the international "periphery" and in the margins of academia, this renewed
faith in Marxism—at least as an analytical tool if not a political
prognostication—is now once again, largely for want of competition, the
common currency of international protest movements.

The similarity, of course, consists in a common failure to learn from the
past—and a symbiotic interdependence, since it is the myopia of the first
that lends spurious credibility to the arguments of the second. Those who
cheer the triumph of the market and the retreat of the state, who would have
us celebrate the unregulated scope for economic initiative in today's "flat"
world, have forgotten what happened the last time we passed this way. They
are in for a rude shock (though, if the past is a reliable guide, probably
at someone else's expense). As for those who dream of rerunning the Marxist
tape, digitally remastered and free of irritating Communist scratches, they
would be well-advised to ask sooner rather than later just what it is about
all-embracing "systems" of thought that leads inexorably to all-embracing
"systems" of rule. On this, as we have seen, Leszek Kolakowski can be read
with much profit. But history records that there is nothing so powerful as a
fantasy whose time has come.'--tony judt
rich


On 9/15/06, Jason Helms <helmstreet at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> OOH, rich.  That's hot shit.  I really dig this reading.  At the same
> time,
> I realize that maybe I should wait to construct all my grand narratives
> until the book has actually come out.  Speaking of which, are there any
> ARCs
> out there?  Will there be?
> -Helms
>
>
> >HI all--
>
> just speculating here but AtD would seem (based on pynchon's own
> description) to be the the third installment along with V., and GR of a
> huge
> mediation on modern culture, imperialism, technology, war, and
> apocalypse--from a global perspective.
>
> I would argue that Lot49, Vineland, and M&D hang together as its main
> concerns are with America--it's late potential for bad shit in the 1st;
> it's
> specific betrayals in the 2nd; and its promising beginnings, if you will.
>
> I like Doug's idea that Pynchon may have been writing this for a long
> time.
> AtD could represent the fullfillment of Pynchon's dream of finishing the
> books he had in his head back in the early 1960s. but as three large
> novels,
> not four as he stated at the time.
>
> of course, it could be something completely different
>
> rich
>
>
>
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