ATD 9/11/the norse/nunatak/serpent/odialesque thing

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 01:05:03 -0700 (PDT) 
From: Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe@[omitted]> 
Subject: Re: Hope you all ... 
To: pynchon-l@[omitted] 

This was my question as I watched the first tower
collapse shortly after posting this morning ...

--- Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt@[omitted]>
wrote:
> Just turned on the news. This is not true, is it?

Absolutely devastating, like watching some apocalyptic
disaster film.   Irwin Allen, Susan Sontag.  I hadn't
seen anything like this since the Challenger
explosion, and that now pales in comparison.  I'm sure
I can't imagine the horror of having seen it in
person, and I'm sure I don't ever want to have the
opportunity to do so, but I was in tears, shaking ... 


News rerunning footage of the second plane hitting the
second tower over and over again, and there's still
that lingering hope, maybe it's all just special
effects ... you can hear someone saying "Holy shit!"
on network TV.  As you should.  But I fear politics
has already coopted the tragedy, the pain, so ...

Sorry, only just recently back on line, thanks for
checking in, everybody, I've just spend the last
couple hours sorting through the day's e-mail,
forwarding messages from friends to friends, and,
while I rememeber as well the difficulties
reestablishing contacts after the San Francisco
earthquake, I'm still anxiously awaiting at least one
last message from the Pentagon or therabouts ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=59343&sort=date

 "Arrived at last at the depot, I joined a mass of citizerns all
trying to get aboard any outbound trains they could find.  At the
entrance, the ungoverned mass of us was somehow spun into single-file,
proceeeding then with ominous slowness to thread the marble maze
inside, its ultimate destination impossible to see." (AtD, Ch. 12, p.
147)

It was  not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and 
near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people 
running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had 
handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman 
with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, 
confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them and there were 
people taking shelter under cars. 
Don DeLillo, Falling Man, pg 3.

Fire and blood were about to roll like fate upon the complacent multitudes. Just 
at the peak of the evening rush-hour, electric power failed everywhere 
throughout the city, and as the gas mains began to ignite and the thousand local 
winds, distinct at every street-corner, to confound prediction, cobblestones 
erupted skyward, to descend blocks away in seldom observed yet beautiful 
patterns. All attempts to counter-attack or even to avoid the Figure would be 
defeated. Later, Fire alarms would go unanswered and the firemen on the front 
lines find themselves too soon without reinforcement, or the hope of any, The 
noise would be horrific and unrelenting, as it grew clear even to the willfully 
careless that there was no refuge. 152


   "'Suppose it were to happen to us, in the civilized world.  If
'another form of life' decided to use humans for similar purposes
[...] we human beings would likewise simply be slaiughtered one by
one, and those still alive to, in some sense, eat their flesh.'" (AtD,
Pt. II, p. 147)

"It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theater." GR3

   "Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and
alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile.
'TheGreat Bovine City of the World,' breathed Lindsay in wonder.
Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats.
>From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past,
had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing
cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped
freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at 
right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn
through the final gate that led to the killing-floor."  (AtD, Pt. I,
Ch. 2, p. 10)