airships and mellow technologies and fictional ideas (not so silly ramblings)

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Beneath the city streets, the warrens of rooms and corridors, the 
          fences and the networks of steel track, the Argentine heart, in its 
          perversity and guilt, longs for a return to that first unscribbled 
          serenity . . .that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky. . . . "

If it weren't fur them danged Iron Horses fuckin' up the scenery

I've been asking one few simple question--what would nearly-Pulitzer Prize award 
[if it fix wasn't in, he would have won] winning author Thomas Ruggles Pynchon's 
relatives be doing around the time covered in Against the Day?

Pynchon and Company was the second-largest investment house to fall in the wake 
of the Great Crash of 1929. I posted this yesterday:
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This link contains the Fitch Bond Book from 1921, about the time where the Chums 
head off to Graceland. The cover says that the book contains complete 
statistical descriptions of the bond issues of industrial, railroad and public 
utilities companies of the United States and Canada.

http://tinyurl.com/ys5fkk

I counted 33 listings of holdings for Pynchon & Company.  27 are railroads.
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More complex, and much more like the Pynchon we have grown to love and 
frequently be confused by, OBA's big time capitalist ancestors were robber 
barons of the Railway era, so now Pynchon gets be more like an American 
Proust, the end of a Royal line writing a fictionalized history, heavily 
embelished with dense, convoluted prose, and now and then a tune or two. 
More likely a Broadway tune from Wilshire Vibe than a rhapsody from 
M. Vinteuil, but music nonetheless. Pynchon's public isolation is much like 
Proust's cork-lined room. Proust's illness was decadance, Pynchon's 
Paranoia, understandable, as he has so throughly mapped the graveyard
of his ancestors and their enemies.

Consider, The Vibes are the caricatures of the Pynchons of old New York.

Much of Pynchon's seeming moral ambiguity comes from the singular fact
that our boy came after the social registers closed the book on his family.


David Morris:
On Nov 7, 2007 8:40 PM, Michael Bailey <bonhommie-man at live.com> wrote:
>
> If (which I'm not totally sure in the kishkas, but there is textual evidence) 
if Pynchon is anti-railway, it's certainly not without justification: noisy, 
polluting, laying steel tracks across ley lines, scaring wildlife...
>

Saying that Pynchon is "anti-railway" makes me cringe a little.
This is way too simplistic an equation.  Pynchon's novels examine
power relationships, and these relationships are constantly shifting.
As a part of his examinations of power structures he idealizes the
untamed/unregulated "wilderness," and sees how it is bridled, carved
up, and enslaved.  Railways are only a component of this dynamic.  Not
inherently "bad" (Really, do you think he likes cars better? Maybe
horses?),  but a potential force used to control and take possession
of what was formerly free.  See this quote from GR (courtesy of
Quail's "Modern Word") to see what he's really getting at.  Remember,
Pynchon loves abstractions, and taking anything literally is usually a
disservice to the intended depths of consideration:

"In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of paper.
The pampas stretched as far as men could imagine, inexhaustible,
fenceless. Wherever the gaucho could ride, that place belonged to him.
But Buenos Aires sought hegemony over the provinces. All those
neuroses about property gathered strength, and began to infect the
countryside. Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is
our national tragedy. We are obsessed by labyrinths, where before
there was the open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns
on the blank sheet. We cannot abide the openness: it is terror to us.
Look at Borges. Look at the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The tyrant Rosas
has been dead a century, but his cult flourishes. Beneath the city
streets, the warrens of rooms and corridors, the fences and the
networks of steel track, the Argentine heart, in its perversity and
guilt, longs for a return to that first unscribbled serenity . . .
that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky. . . . "
--Gravity's Rainbow V264/B307