Vl-IV, Chapter 3: . . . this is a real revolution, pgs 26, 27

[Dave Monroe]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 2:07 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> Hector's reassembling of his bowling-lanes vegetarian tostada is an attempt to turn crap food into the comfort food he was raised on.  In a way, it's like going belly-up, making himself more vulnerable to Zoyd, as a sign of, if not friendship, then friendliness.....

"He ordered the Health Food Enchilada Special and Hector had the soup
of the day, cream of zucchini, and the vegetarian tostada, which upon
its arrival he began to take apart piece by piece and reassemble as
something else Zoyd could not identify but which seemed to hold
meaning for Hector." (VL, Ch. 3, p. 25)

"Grinning--a stretched and terrible face.  It was the closest Hector
got to feeling sorry for himself, this suggestion he liked to put out
that among the fallen, he had fallen further than most, not in
distance alone but also in the quality of descent having begun long
ago concentrated and graceful as a sky diver but--the tostada
procedure was minor evidence--he growing less professional the longer
he fell, while his skills as a field man depreciated."  (VL, Ch. 3, p.
29)

"fallen" = preterite?  tragic?

"to take apart piece by piece and reassemble"

Main Entry: anal·y·sis
Pronunciation: &-'na-l&-s&s
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural anal·y·ses  /-"sEz/
Etymology: New Latin, from Greek, from analyein to break up, from ana-
+ lyein to loosen -- more at LOSE
Date: 1581
1 : separation of a whole into its component parts
2 a : the identification or separation of ingredients of a substance b
: a statement of the constituents of a mixture
3 a : proof of a mathematical proposition by assuming the result and
deducing a valid statement by a series of reversible steps b (1) : a
branch of mathematics concerned mainly with functions and limits (2) :
CALCULUS 1b
4 a : an examination of a complex, its elements, and their relations b
: a statement of such an analysis
5 a : a method in philosophy of resolving complex expressions into
simpler or more basic ones b :
clarification of an expression by an elucidation of its use in discourse
6 : the use of function words instead of inflectional forms as a
characteristic device of a language
7 : PSYCHOANALYSIS

http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

Cf. ...

"There has been this strange connection between the German mind and
the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for
at least two centuries since Leibniz, in the process of inventing
calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of
cannonballs through the air."  (GR, Pt. III, pp. 406-7)

   "Three hundred years ago mathematicians were learning to break the
cannonball's rise and fall into stairsteps of range and height,
delta-x and delta-y, allowing them to grow smaller and smaller,
approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking midges galloped
upstairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing feet growing
finer, smoothing out into continuous sound.  This analytic legacy has
been handed down intact.  It brough the technicians at Peenemunde to
peer at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, delta-x
by delta-y, flightless themselves ... film and calculus, both
pornographies of flight." (GR, Pt. III, p. 523)

>From Michael Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson,
Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992)
...

"Dwight Eddins has even suggested there is an antidote to
pornographies of flight, for 'when we integrate, we return to
integrity, to all that the original, unbroken arc means by way of
momentary grace, momentary freedom, and the natural triumph of
gravity' ([The Gnostic Pynchon] 1983, 78).  But this 'reintegration'
is itself an already performed illusion, already part of the structure
of film and calculus: both are forms of dismemberment and
reconstitution which are reassembled into illusions of unity--in this
case, unified and continuous motion.  For as Pynchon writes elsewhere
in Gravity's Rainbow, the pornography of film and calculus is not that
they carve up originary unities, but that they feign such unities:
'There has been this strange connection between the German mind and
the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for
at least two
centuries--since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used
the same approach to break up the trajectory of cannonballs through
the air' (GR 407).

   "In my reconstruction, then, 'pornography' in Gravity's Rainbow
describes a regressive anamnesia
that recreates illusory, prelapsarian (or preliguistic) unities
through a complex mechanism of dismemberment and reconfiguration; and
since nostalgia itself works by much the same dynamic, Pynchon's
'pornography' gives us fresh purchase on the cultural critique of
nostalgia as well.  His novel offers us a veritable miscellany of
macropolitical nostalgia and fantasied 'restoration': in its American
version, the myth of the virgin land ...." (pp. 247-9)

"... the 'falsity' of Pynchonian pornographies lies not in their
rituals of dismemberment but in their
fetishistic reassemblies, not in their cutting up of organic (w)holes
but in their recomposition of
inorganic wholes that fetishize the very idea of organic wholes.  At
the very least, we should be wary of endorsing the book's various
depictions of nostalgia, return, 'Diasporas running backwards' (GR
737); ideally, we should also be wary of approaching Gravity's Rainbow
as if fragmentation were a problem to be solved by critical
intervention ..." (p. 251)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010&msg=50144

In the novel Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon uses the term
"pornography" to denote modes of
representation and reproduction which fragment continuous experience
into discrete, quantifiable,
replicable units -- modes of representation/reproduction which
simulate fluid movement while
relying upon discontinuous, static elements. Pynchon's Gravity's
Rainbow focuses chiefly upon two specific varieties of such
"pornography": calculus and film. It is clear, though, that Pynchon's
definition of "pornography" would apply equally well to digital
information processing (or, indeed, to any mode of representation
which can be mechanically reproduced). Like a movie, which
approximates continuous motion by speedily scrolling through a series
of discontinuous static images, and like pornography, which relies
upon the dismantling of a (usually female) body, digital
technology splinters unified experience into an array of pixels,
samples, or bits.

http://www.2street.com/cyborg/porn.htm
http://www.2street.com/cyborg/top.html

The societal effects of the technological exhumation and circulation
of dead matter are reinforced by the implementation of mathematical
"Analysis" in Gravity's Rainbow. Whereas Rocketry components are
derived from the inorganic chemistry of the benzene ring, the Rocket's
flight trajectory is made possible by the "analytic legacy" emanating
from the calculus of Leibniz. However, calculus (and film) are
"flightless  themselves" and are instead "pornographies of flight." In
expressing the desire for real and living flight, Leibniz's dream of
reducing the world to the ones and zeroes of binary code actually
produces a simulation or pornography of flight.

http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/spencer24.htm