AtDDtA(15): F.I.C.O.T.T.

[Dave Monroe]

   "'Good point.  Let me buy you something--Horst can make whatever
you'd like, nobody's stumped him since the F.I.C.O.T.T., and then it
was debatable.'
   "'Since the ...?'
   "'First International Conference On Time Travel, and say, what a
hootnanny that was.'" (AtD, Pt. II, p. 412 f.)


F.I.C.O.T.T.
As Alonzo Meatman goes right on to explain, F.I.C.O.T.T. is the
acronym for the First International Conference On Time Travel, but
readers of Gravity's Rainbow will recall also "Fickt" from the line
"Fickt nicht mit dem Raketemensch," or "Don't f--k with the
Rocketman."

hootnanny
Typo? Should be hootenanny, an informal performance by folk singers,
typically with participation by the audience. The OED says that it can
be spelled either way, and also hootananny.

Bohr... Mach... young Einstein... Spengler... Wells... McTaggart
All of these people did work involving either speculation about time
(Wells) or other subjects that reached their highest expression in
Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which had implications regarding the
nature of time and spacetime. Pynchon refers to the fact that this
work was underway and 'in the air' at the time of the novel.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_397-428#Page_412

Niels Bohr
http://www.nba.nbi.dk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1922/bohr-bio.html

Ernst Mach
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mach
http://academic.udayton.edu/gregelvers/hop/?m=3&a=77&key=53
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm

"young Einstein"
http://imdb.com/title/tt0096486/
http://youtube.com/watch?v=dEL_BT_Z6Yg
http://www.yahooserious.com/einstein.html

Dr. Spengler
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/spengle.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v17/v17n2p-2_Stimely.html
http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/spengler/
http://www.duke.edu/~aparks/Spengler.html

"Mr. Wells himself"
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hgwells.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?H._G._Wells
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/w#a30
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0920229/
http://www.hgwellsusa.50megs.com/
http://www.bartleby.com/86/

"Professor J.M.E. McTaggart of Cambridge, England"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._E._McTaggart


"a brief address dismissing altogether the existence of Time"

McTaggart, J. Ellis.  "The Unreality of Time."
   Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy,
   Vol. 17, No. 68 (1908): 456-473.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-4423(190810)2%3A17%3A68%3C457%3ATUOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y
http://www.archive.org/details/unreality_of_time
http://librivox.org/unreality_of_time/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreality_of_Time
http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~suchii/mctaggart.html


"... except that this was not how the Proceedings proceeded"

The International Workingmen's Association (The First International)

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/iwma/index.htm

"Due to the wide variety of philosophies present in the First
International, there was conflict from the start...."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workingmen's_Association

Communist International, First Congress (March 2-6, 1919)

http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/mar/comintern.htm

http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/dissolution.htm

"THE THIRD International has been officially buried. In the most
undignified and contemptible fashion it would be possible to conceive,
it has passed off the stage of history. Hurriedly and without
consultation with all the adhering parties, not to speak of the rank
and file throughout the world, without any democratic discussion and
decision, as the result of the pressure of American imperialism,
Stalin has perfidiously abandoned the Comintern."

http://www.marxist.com/TUT/TUT1-4.html

Thank again AGAIN, Robin ...


"the McTaggarite, the neo-Augustinian, and the fatal steamed pudding"

An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman is a popular form of joke in
the United Kingdom. The nationalities involved may vary ...

[...]

The jokes are sometimes retold as being about a redhead, a brunette
and a blonde, or a priest, a minister and a rabbi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Englishman,_an_Irishman_and_a_Scotsman

Many Jewish jokes involve a rabbi and some other religion's clergyman.
Often they start with something like "A rabbi and a priest..." and
make fun of either the rabbi's interpretation of Christianity or
(seeming) differences between Christian and Jewish interpretation of
same areas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_humor#About_Christianity

"McTaggarite"

McTaggart's objective in this paper was to show that change can be
understood in terms of events moving from the future to the present to
the past and then to try to demonstrate that this change was not a
property of events themselves, nor a relation between events; and that
the time series in which this temporal change appeared to occur does
not exist. He then declared that time was not a real thing in the
physical world.

[...]

McTaggart considers the possibility that time is related to individual
observers but he does not include any discussion of relativity and
assumes that there is only one time, true for all observers: "The
present through which events really pass, therefore, cannot be
determined as simultaneous with the specious present. It must have a
duration fixed as an ultimate fact." This viewpoint is now known to
contradict special relativity theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreality_of_Time

"neo-Augustinian"

Augustine adopts a subjective view of time and says that time is
nothing in reality but exists only in the human mind's apprehension of
reality. He believes that time is not infinite because God "created"
it....

http://www.iep.utm.edu/a/augustin.htm

It is an irony that the man who bequeathed a Neoplatonic world view to
the West also gave us a way of conceptualizing human history that is
at odds with some of its most basic contours. In the Greco-Roman world
in general and in Neoplatonism in particular, the importance of
history is largely in the cyclical patterns that forge the past,
present, and future into a continuous whole, emphasizing what is
repeated and common over what is idiosyncratic and unique. In
Augustine, we find a conception of human history that in effect
reverses this schema by providing a linear account which presents
history as the dramatic unfolding of a morally decisive set of
non-repeatable events.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#6

St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), in his autobiographical Confessions,
is credited with reconceptualizing the notion of time in Christian
terms. Throyle, on p.143, summarizes what he terms "Christian time,"
as a "linear way of regarding time, a simple straight line from past,
through present, into the future." See also Eschatology.

"fatal steamed pudding"

Presumably the subject of the "Christmas-pudding controversy"
mentioned on p. 406. In the context of Prof. Taggart's disbelief in
time and the Augustinian's presumed belief that time moves inevitably
toward Christ's return, a Christmas pudding (which, one should
mention, is prepared with suet or similar animal fat, though
presumably Smegmo can be substituted) is a symbol, insofar as it
invokes the birth of Christ, of a pivotal moment in the proper
sequence of Augustinian time. The pudding, which context here suggests
the neo-Augustinian dropped on the McTaggartite, at once symbolizes
the Fall of Man, as well as the McTaggartite's inevitable descent into
Hell. The whole arrangement is problematized, however, by the comments
of the County Coroner, who describes the outcome of the event
dependent on "wagering," chance being irreconcilable with Augustinian
time.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_397-428#Page_412

"They evade: they sleep late, they seek euphemisms. When they do
mention death they try to make it with the jokes" (SL, "Intro," p. 5)

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/slowlearner/smallrain.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72936

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=73174

   Pynchon (somewhat like Woody Allen) uses most of his narratives as
armatures on which to hang jokes, puns, discursions, meditations,
allusions, quodlibets, etc., about thematic issues that repeatedly
concern him: "power" and "unreason" (Pynchon, WSR 29), the relation of
individual and state. The more elaborate the joke, the more likely it
is to be thematically important; the more seemingly removed the
passage is from the manifest issues of the text, the deeper we may
have to look to find the referent. Since text and subtext in Pynchon's
fiction take turns carrying the thematic charge, we have to keep our
magic eye peeled to, as the narrator tells us at the end of  Gravity's
Rainbow, "Follow the bouncing ball" (760).

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/jokespuns.htm

http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_puns_hollander.htm

New and Improved 'Jokes and Puns in Gravity's Rainbow'

http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_jokes_hollander.htm

There ARE similar moments ("a/the _____, a/the _____, and a/the
______") elsewhere in Pynchon, I just can't come up with them/find
them easily now.  Help!  Thanks!