Pynchon Pre-Birthday Bash a Regular Krupp Wingding

[Dave Monroe]

On 5/3/08, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> "There are many wonderful foods in Pynchon's work, starting with
> bananas and good coffee. perhaps," this unnamed writer chastises.
> "Mason & Dixon... is loaded with some interesting foods...What
> Slothrop vomits is a (light) comic riff on bad food in our fast-food
> overprocessed world. Honor Pynchon's life-embracing love of the right
> kind of food, if one is having a party for him, I say."
> "I will say, in full disclosure, that I surely do not have the sense
> of humor Mr. Pynchon does," the letter winds down, "so perhaps I am
> too earnest and am making mountains out of what Pynchon would not."
> Perhaps. Anyway, if Miller isn't hauled into jail for postering party
> fliers around the neighborhood—and he reports that he's already gotten
> one warning—the party's set to begin at 3 p.m.
>
> http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/party_hopping/pynchon_prebirthday_bash_a_regular_krupp_wingding_83930.asp

"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.
    "'Lookit that, lookit your food, Hector, what have you done?'
   "'At last I'm not droppín it all over the place, includín my shirt,
like I was out in some parkín lot.'"  (VL, Ch. 3, p. 25)

"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&sort=date

And see as well ...

http://www.2street.com/cyborg/pynch1.htm
http://www.2street.com/cyborg/pynch2.htm
http://www.2street.com/cyborg/pynch3.htm
http://www.2street.com/cyborg/pynch4.htm

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

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0308&msg=84627