AtdTDA: [38] p. 1071 A Certain Word

[Mark Kohut]

Robin,

Another terrific post......I want to be "just askin": 

Yes, the case that that certain word not yet spoken is "Fascism" is strong, as some wiki poster has posited.

But is it what TRP meant?.....any other possible words? 

Mark


--- On Sat, 8/9/08, robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: AtdTDA: [38] p. 1071  A Certain Word
> To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Saturday, August 9, 2008, 11:11 AM
> "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.