A reality stranger than fiction

Fri Sep 14 14:56:45 CDT 2007

Lawrence,

  Just because I learned of catastrophe theory MUCH later, you are right, it seems.
  And a great find re that great riff on History in V....

  Leave it to OBA to turn that math concept into a wonderful overarching metaphor...

  I think you should post the connection on the V. wiki......

  MK

Lawrence Bryan <lebryan at speakeasy.org> wrote:

About the time V was written, wasn't Rene' Thom's Catastrophe Theory getting popularized? Many of the simpler examples had pictures of folded surfaces, some with grids that could look like warp and weave.   

  Lawrence

    On Sep 14, 2007, at 5:38 AM, Guy Ian Scott Pursey wrote:

  Unfortunately, I havent read AtD yet  its the only Pynchon novel that I havent. My bookshelf is currently taking the burden for me while my bedside table cowers in anticipation. Ive had it since it first came out here in the UK and Im actually pretty keen to read it but might wait for the paperback. (All this deep reading is making the book seem ever-more intriguing and appealing.)

  I would suggest, from what I have read of Pynchon, that the whole idea is to be on a crest or at least level with one. Once youve accumulated a mountain of historical details (as Pynchon has) you only need to have the strength, stamina and oxygen to scale it, reach the peak and perhaps a whole topography of folds and crests is visible. If that isnt all stretching a metaphor too far J

  Guy

  PS> Hope you dont mind me copying the list in  it was a bit of an afterthought but Im interested to see if any one else has anything to add to this train of thought. Unfortunately, I havent read any Gibson either.

---------------------------------

  From: Mark Kohut [mailto:markekohut at yahoo.com] 
Sent: 13 September 2007 17:27
To: Guy Ian Scott Pursey
Subject: RE: A reality stranger than fiction

    YES!......thanks much........I too remember it but not as well as you nor where to find it

    nor how f'in' great is the expressed idea via TPS....

    gonna memorizt it now (if I still can)

    Do you think part of the meaning of AtD, with the larger time frame  in which the characters actually act (even without counting the time travellers), is to be "on a crest"

    of history and see it all more completely?

    mk

Guy Ian Scott Pursey <g.i.s.pursey at reading.ac.uk> wrote:

    "Perhaps history this century [...] is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated [...] at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. [...] Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see." (V., pp.155-156)

    I remember when I first read it  blew me away.

    Guy

---------------------------------

    From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Mark Kohut
Sent: 10 September 2007 23:13
To: Dave Monroe
Cc: pynchon -l
Subject: Re: A reality stranger than fiction

    TRP has something---in V.? GR?---about the "folds" of history very like, no?

Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

    A reality stranger than fiction
Angela Bennie
September 7, 2007

WILLIAM GIBSON HAS a nodal theory of history. It is a little like the
astronomers' string theory but with knots in it.

There are certain points in history, Gibson says, where the world
switches course, "where all the balls in the game move and settle in
new positions". These nodal points are rare, he says, and quite random
and they might not even be recognisable as significant when they
occur.

Their causes and effects can even seem quite mysterious afterwards.
But whatever the circumstances of the event, the only thing that is
really clear to him is that, having reached the node, or the blip in
the historical course of human affairs, the world is set on an
irreversibly different course.

September 11, 2001, he says, was one of those events. "In some ways
September 11 was the true beginning of the 21st century," Gibson says.
He's speaking from Chicago late in the afternoon, one of his pit stops
in a gruelling tour across the United States to promote his new book,
Spook Country.

"And at this point it is still perhaps only our narrative. But the way
we have responded to it is changing things for other people in the
world, too. So it is now becoming part of their narratives and their
narratives will have different versions of the cause and its effects
of the event.

"So it is like this seismic shock, one whose waves are still moving up
the time line. At its epicentre is 9/11."

What he doesn't say is that this seismic shock changed the course of
his writing, too....

http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/a-reality-stranger-than-fiction/2007/09/06/1188783376158.html

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