AtdTDA: [38] p. 1071 A Certain Word

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

         "Hold on Cowboy!" leaning gleefully on the stick as they 
          went into a steep, stomach-lifting dive.

          Monte Davis: Kinda describes the advent of the dear old 
          20th century, doesn't it?

Mos Def, MD as we collectively rush headlong into the next thought, Futurism:

          They were soon going so fast that something happened to time, 
          and maybe they'd slipped for a short interval into the Future, the 
          Future known to Italian Futurists, with events superimposed on 
          one another, and geometry straining irrationally away in all 
          directions including a couple of extra dimensions as they 
          continued hellward, a Hell that could never contain Kit's 
          abducted young wife. . . .

>From the Wikipedia article on Futurism:

          Futurism was an art movement that originated in Italy in the 
          early 20th century. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though 
          there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere.
          The Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was its founder and 
          most influential personality. He launched the movement in his 
          Futurist Manifesto, which he published in the French daily 
          newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. In it Marinetti 
          expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially 
          political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past," 
          he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists 
          admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the 
          plane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological 
          triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate 
          nationalists.
          The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, 
          sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, 
          theatre, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture and even 
          gastronomy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_(art)

And after a "shuddering prop-to-tail assault on airframe integrity", 
Kit is turned on by "the incorporation of death into what otherwise 
would only be a carnival ride."

This leads to another silly song. I'd look it up in the "Italian Wedding 
Fake Book by Deleuze & Guattari."

The Pynchon wiki is worth quoting here:

          If this book isn't real, it oughtta be. Fake books are collections 
          of songs that provide basic chord changes for working 
          musicians who need to play said tunes in a hurry — like on a 
          gig. The auteurial attribution is a very sly academic joke. 
          Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Felix Guattari (1930-1992) 
          were post-modernist philosophers best known for two esoteric 
          volumes on capitalism and schizophrenia, originally written 
          in French. Volume one was Anti-Oedipus; volume two was 
          A Thousand Plateaus.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1063-1085#Page_1
070

>From "Postmodern Theory, Critical Interrogations" by Steven Best and Douglas 
Kelner:

          Chapter 3: Deleuze and Guattari: Schizos, Nomads, Rhizomes 
          [excerpt]

          Their most influential book to date, Anti-Oedipus (1983; orig. 1972) 
          is a provocative critique of modernity's discourses and institutions 
          which repress desire and proliferate fascists subjectivities that 
          haunt even revolutionary movements. Deleuze and Guattari have 
          been political militants and perhaps the most enthusiastic of 
          proponents of a micropolitics of desire that to precipitate radical 
          change through a liberation of desire. Hence they anticipate the    
          possibility of a new postmodern mode of existence where 
          individuals overcome repressive modern forms of identity and 
          stasis to become desiring nomads in a constant process of 
          becoming and transformation.

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/pomo/ch3.html

Remember that the Grand Cohen found Clive useful as the only friend 
of the devil? There's another Orphic echo what with the abduction thing 
and all, and Kit is being seduced by the blandishments of Fascism,
envy, jealousy and desire turned, tempered and corrupted into the 
working tools of the plutonian spheres of influence.

>From the quarterly journal "International Socialism", 
"Gramsci: the Turin years" by Megan Trudell :

          In August 1917 a general strike began in Turin after police killed 
          two people during a protest over bread shortages. It quickly 
          became a powerful expression of a potentially revolutionary 
          anti-war movement. According to Marc Ferro, ‘The strikes…were
          reminiscent in many ways of those in Petrograd in February. 
          Women and youth had a vital part in them, trying to fraternise 
          with the carabinieri [armed police] and shouting, “Don’t fire at 
          your brothers”.’ The Turin rising was brutally repressed. Troops 
          armed with machine guns killed over 50 people and wounded 800. 
          Over 1,000 demonstrators, mainly Fiat workers, were sent 
          to the front, and the war zone in north east Italy was extended 
          to include the provinces of Genoa and Turin, and as far south 
          as Sicily.

More at:

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=306&issue=114

Kit's value system has been turned inside out by now, like taking off 
a glove or a complex problem in topology. He's got Webb's urge to
blow stuff up, but he also has developed some sense of karma in his 
travels. But Renzo has already stopped wearing civilian clothes, lotsa
eagles, very, very Vineland.