airships and mellow technologies and fictional ideas (silly ramblings, really)

[Mark Kohut]

Two obs. The first:
is this 'existential' terror--this pampas openness--- something we just have to live with in TRPs
vision? 
And, ala Weber, Norman Brown or Ernest Becker, what we, many, not everyone but some, the Elect let's call them, 
start trying to overcome by.......exerting power over others? 

OR exerting power over others unjustly?

Re the human dwellings of Colorado: perhaps they are so 'mean' because their
owners and makers are so,  unjustly, poor?

Yes, "back to nature" means you are not there [in nature]

MK


----- Original Message ----
From: Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net>
To: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thursday, November 8, 2007 12:43:25 PM
Subject: RE: airships and mellow technologies and fictional ideas (silly ramblings, really)

David Morris sez:

> As a part of his examinations of 
> power structures he idealizes the untamed/unregulated 
> "wilderness"...

Note the ambivalence within the gaucho's speech itself: "We cannot abide the
openness.  It is terror to us." Are ATD's polar waste and Central Asian
desert really congenial places? Was Sudwest, even before the Herero war? Or
the environs of the Kirghiz Light, or of Vheissu? Or Mauritius? Aren't
Charles and Jeremiah terrified every bit as much as exalted as they approach
the Ohio? Re-read the Colorado landscapes: see how often human dwellings are
described in terms like "...fasten their mean shacks to the mountain with
steel cable and eyebolts and let the wind roar and be damned. And next
morning be out in it picking up  pieces of roof and stovepipes and what all
hadn't been blown to Mexico yet." (364) Home, sweet home, eh?

I'd say it's a very special, highly charged and double-edged kind of
"idealization" going on, a lot more nuanced than any back-to-nature that
Rousseau or Marie Antoinette would recognize. Pynchon's a writer; while he
may not like what history has scribbled, the blank page is pretty damn
scary, too.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20071108/45505b54/attachment-0001.html>