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

[grladams at teleport.com]

Isn't it terror because there is nothing up or down to see, no curve?
Aren't we intended to notice that all this stuff depends on the play of
where we can pur our eyes? These latest threads, the way Chums would view a
world below, fields of grain, not as a linar rail would, as spokes
narrowing to a hub but as independent squares tapering away at the horizon.
Not the same but similar plays are the perceptions He's written about in
the inner earth where we cozily point inward, concerned with one another.
Notice how the pampas, the shapes of the contrasts with a curved
embankment? All the discussions lately are reminding me of mondaugen's law,
and how now with google book, nytimes historical online editions, my Now is
really blowing my mind. Being able to see time like this. For a movie that
doesn't suck, see Paycheck, directed by Wu, with Uma and Ben. It has
elements of the curvature --represents the lesson learned about socalled
comforts of being able to see the future. It's terror to be on the pampas
until the worse terror of being able to see the future replaces that. Oh
well, rambling now..

Jill

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Mark Kohut markekohut at yahoo.com
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 15:06:11 -0800 (PST)
To: monte.davis at verizon.net, pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: airships and mellow technologies and fictional ideas (silly
ramblings, really)


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.

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