AtDDtA1: "The Great Bovine City of the World"

[Dave Monroe]

On 1/23/07, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

>  "Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and
> alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile.  'The
> Great Bovine City of the World,' breathed Lindsay in wonder.  Indeed,
> the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats.  From this
> height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often
> witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike
> patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom
> being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right
> angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn
> through the final gate that led to the killing-floor."  (AtD, Pt. I,
> Ch. 2, p. 10)

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=114381

Cf. ...

"Isn't the destiny of American literature that of crossing limits and
frontiers, causing deterritorialized flows of desire to circulate, but
also always making these flows transport fascisizing, moralizing,
Puritan and familialist territories?"

--Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 305

Cited in...

Jon Hackett, "Freedom, force and space: Pynchon's politics of æther"

http://www.graat.fr/4%20Hackett.pdf
http://www.graat.fr/readingpynchon.htm