Logicomix Re: The Devil & Tom Foley Walker

[Simon Bryquer]

Logicomix ---- Paperback Pub date in Sept.

This title might be of interest to Pynchon readers.

Here's a brief description from the website:

Covering a span of sixty years, the graphic novel Logicomix was inspired by 
the epic story of the quest for the Foundations of Mathematics.

This was a heroic intellectual adventure most of whose protagonists paid the 
price of knowledge with extreme personal suffering and even insanity.  The 
book tells its tale in an engaging way, at the same time complex and 
accessible. It grounds the philosophical struggles on the undercurrent of 
personal emotional turmoil, as well as the momentous historical events and 
ideological battles which gave rise to them.

The role of narrator is given to the most eloquent and spirited of the story’s 
protagonists, the great logician, philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell. 
It is through his eyes that the plights of such great thinkers as Frege, 
Hilbert, Poincaré, Wittgenstein and Gödel come to life, and through his own 
passionate involvement in the quest that the various narrative strands come 
together.

This is the URL of the website:

http://www.logicomix.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=53



Simon Bryquer

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "alice wellintown" <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 08, 2009 8:55 AM
Subject: Re: The Devil & Tom Foley Walker


> "The Devil & Tom Walker" is a great tale by one America's most
> important, now somewhat neglected, authors. I wish I could send some
> paintings I have of the scenes with the Black Man. Several artists
> have painted scenes from the tale. Cool. In any event, a cool book
> that includes some Ryder paintings is Sarah Burns' _Painting the Dark
> Side_, it’s now a Google book and can be located on the WWW.
>
> All this Foley in the Park stuff reminds me of a cover on one of those
> Vinelands, a black and white photograph of clear cut forest. And it
> reminds me of that stinking Hell Frank ascends/descends, all stripped
> of life (297). He meets his Beatrice/Dally and they ascend/descend
> into a Miltonic Pandemonium Plus (Milton not Dante is credited with
> the word, Pandemonium, PL Book I),  the Gallows Frame Saloon. Sailor's
> Grave (V.) and inverted stars (M&D) and what knots …the Walker
> connection is a Classic Tripartite again.
>
> Remember the Zone  Herero regard the rocket as both their Destiny and
> their Torah. (520) The Herero are Kabbalists. What are these magician
> scholars trying to discover in the Torah or the Rocket? Like Slothrop
> they are on a quest to find the Holy Center, Kansas, Home Dorothy and
> ET, Woodstock for the Hippies, Self for Oedipus, Garden of America.
>
> Ezian says (319) it’s a Center they need to get back to, the Garden, a
> place without time, the journey without,  where every departure is a
> return to the same place, the only place….Now these Kabbalists hope to
> get to the bottom of the womb/cave/Mother/….Netherworld-Moon, Holy
> Center, Holy Center with exhaustive explication of  the Text and
> shooting a rocket. Where? At the moon? Well the moon is a tomb or a
> womb or a Center lost, like Eden,  that the Zone Herero can only study
> and get all mixed up in. The Herero conjunction of netherworld and
> moon as Holy Center is parodied by the doctrines of other Rocket
> cultists
> in the novel.  Weisenburger says that TRP's accuracy on these
> Kabbalistics "confirms that Scholem's Major Trends was his source in
> these matters." On page 753 we have a count down.   There are ten
> stages of the inner world through which God
> descends-His revelation in the Shekinah. This ties back to Greta, but
> here we get Fritz Lang's UFA film Die Frau im
> Mond and the count down moves from film to Life As Film.  So Steve
> Edelman, the Kabbalistic spokesman says, The Tree of Life itself was
> brought into being, that is the Tree rooted at the Bodenplatte where
> the dead abide, was brought into existence by "the Great Firing." The
> Ten Sephiroth of the Tree (see Major Trends page 214 for a diagram)
> are associated with the Rocket countdown;  you count down but the
> Rocket goes up. The Rocket countdown "actually conceals the Tree of
> Life." So once again,  the sacred guarantor of Return has been
> co-opted by technological mysticism as part of a one-way process
> designed to thwart the renewal of life. And, Captain Blicero, the guy
> who wants to leave "this cycle of infection and death" imagines the
> moon once reached by the Rocket will become "our new Deathkingdom", a
> vacuous sphere inhabited by homosexual men. And what will Man be then?
> He will be reduced to little more than "black and white film-images."
> And what of Man’s dreams? They will be dreaming not of warmth and
> communion but of perpetual separation from "loved ones."  How they
> will cherish their "loneliness."  They Fly Toward a "sterile grace."
> It is an Absolutely unnatural Ideal.  A Black and White Heart of
> Darkness: a vacuous parody of Earth's vital core, a glass sphere.
>
> THREE: NYC,  the Valley of Ashes, Long Island's rich great green
> breast as seen through the Dutch Sailor's eyes, in The Great Gatsby.
> Return or getting back to the Garden, to the Girl of his Dreams is a
> quest that is destined to Fai, a Tragic quest. And why does he want a
> Daisy when there is a Myrtle in the Valley of Ashes? The same reason
> Myrtle is a consumer of prattle and Tom's violent wealth. Poor
> Myrtle/Mary, flower of life; she is Henry Adams' Virgin Fecundity Run
> Down by the Machine. In any event, The Romance is the obvious Pynchon
> connection, but the Realism (Henry James) is also connected here.
> Because Gatsby is a novel of machine manners, the constant flicker
> (one of the best critical essays on Gatsby is Guy Reynold's, "The
> Constant Flicker"), but also a Realistic novel about raw power. That
> Power is Plutocracy. The novel is a battle of old and new money and
> Myrtle (the Earth) gets run over. The Plutocracy, when challanged,
> from below, by the Nego or the Jew or the soldier or the worker, forms
> a United Front, it will  send Kit of Booker T or Invisible Man to
> "school" with a Telluride scholarship, and, even good soldiers, who
> are needed when the cartels have family feuds on a grand scale, and
> who obtain some equality when all is general issue, and may even get
> to fuck a Daisy, must be made tragic. But the Daisy Chain turns as the
> billboard god's of commerce look on, and at least, for the preterite,
> the Valley of Ashes will be a Park. A Moses project, it is where the
> Worlds Fair was contructed and a beautiful Park now stands where the
> ashes of industrialism once choked the life out of the Virgin.
>
> http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/vt_flushing_meadows/vt_flushing_meadows_park.html
>