Atdtda22: [42.2ii] The empty suburban lamplight, 614

[grladams at teleport.com]

I'm not sure that the system has won. I think people find ways around
buying what "they" want us to buy or using their attention span to watch or
look at what "they" want us to look at. To me, I keep thinking, that it's
an age old thing, dragged along by the writer-thinker Pynchons since the
seventeenth century or earlier, about the apparent conflict about the
Sabbath? That to keep darkness darkness and light light is to hold the line
on just what keeps us from being imbedded into the secular system, that
which is seen as evil. To look up from my keyboard, my bluetooth in ear,
wires from ipod sticking out, patch for an app downloading, adapter for IE
interference dangling from my digital cordless landline, at 3 am reading a
facsimile of William Pynchon, blah blah, I know we are edging away from
this what might be termed "right living" and perhaps it's an oblique
warning, look out, here's what happens to those who _make it profitable_ to
1) reduce our exposure to natural light.../and/or 2) cause us to become
dependent on the unnatural light?  So the emphasis is on the method and
cost of distribution, rather than on the light itself. 

Jill


Original Message:
-----------------
From: Mark Kohut markekohut at yahoo.com
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:36:55 -0800 (PST)
To: kelber at mindspring.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Atdtda22: [42.2ii] The empty suburban lamplight, 614


Well, of course you are right about power re electricity and electric
light. 

But I'm going to suggest, in Pynchon's way, that both may be true. That is,
that 
TRP in AtD presents electric light as almost entirely a modern technology
that adds to all that alienates us
in 'the modern world".
 
Not least because the System won.
Not least because TRPs vision of the modern world  as a place to live is
largely negative (with bits
of good possibilities) ; he satirizes the modern world and all that built
it relentlessly, especially technologically and
scientifically; makes fun of it: condemns its implications sentence after
sentence. 
 
I am now thinking that Byron's promise is another"daylit fiction" in TRPs
world, not least because his promised immortality is not "human"...(of
course, Byron isn't either but it is another technological/scientific
'promise", no matter who owns it). And there is the Von Braun epigraph.
 
Human, as deep vision seen in glints and hints, matters in AtD (and all of
TRPs works, of course). 
 
 I know I am in the minority here with this (and some related notions);
maybe a minority of one. Maybe I'm as mad
as Kinbote trying to "understand' Slade's poem in Pale Fire? Or I'm just
narrowly stupid and asking/answering 'all the wrong questions' as some
p-listers probably think. So be it.  I've been wrong before. I've been
right before.

Thanks for challenging me and I will try to keep from boring you and all
via player-piano-like repetition.

MK

 
----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2007 10:58:39 PM
Subject: Re: Atdtda22: [42.2ii] The empty suburban lamplight, 614

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>


>Once again, I'll risk reductionism by suggesting:
> 
>Natural light is almost always a positive in AtD.
>Electric light is almost always not. 

It's not so much electrical light, as it is the controlling of light by
"the system," that's evil.  Edison profiteering by being the servant of the
ruling class, at the expense of renegades like Tesla.  And in GR, Byron the
Bulb haplessly struggling to give electricity over to the people by making
it unprofitable for the powers that be.

Laura


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