AtD--How Does it Fit

[Sean Carroll]

According to my contact at Penguin ARC's will only be distributed to 
reviewers.  From what he told me there is a very tight lid on them.  
Apparently, the author fears the book, or large portions of it, being 
leaked.  Maybe that is why he wrote the blurb and allowd the one page 
excerpt for the Penguin Press catalogue.  Perhaps he thought this 
information would sate the reading public.


>From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
>To: "Jason Helms" <helmstreet at hotmail.com>
>CC: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: AtD--How Does it Fit
>Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 16:55:32 -0400
>
>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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