CoL49 (2) Everything smelled like hairspray [PC 24/25]

[Robin Landseadel]

 From Adrian Wisnicki: "A trove of new works by Thomas Pynchon? Bomarc  
Service News rediscovered" Pynchon Notes ,  Spring, 2000

	Other passages might best be described as suggestive, such as
	the following discussion from "'Teflon' in Depth":

		Teflon dates back to 1938 when the resins were first	
		synthesized in Du Pont Company's laboratories. The initial
		compound was a polymer of tetrafluoroethylene (TFE),
		which is a chemical relative of "Freon" fluorocarbon
		propellants and refrigerants, and today is used as a
		standard refrigerant in home air conditioners and is also
		the most popular propellant in push-button aerosol
		packages. In 1943, limited quantities of Teflon TFE-
		fluorocarbon were being produced and all of it was
		snapped up by the military. The Manhattan Project found it
		to be the only gasketing and valve-packing material
		suitable for specific atomic energy plant operations. The
		material was later used for proximity fuse nose cones in
		naval and artillery shells.
		(BSN 31: 3-4)

	Though the substance under discussion is Teflon, Pynchon
	readers will recall another passage, which runs in part:
	"Imipolex G has proved to be nothing more--or less--sinister
	than a new plastic, an aromatic heterocyclic polymer,
	developed in 1939, years before its time, by one L. Jamf for IG
	Farben. [...] The origins of Imipolex G are traceable back to early
	research done at du Pont" (GR 249). It hardly takes an
	imaginative leap to see how, in terms of both chemical and
	historical information, the Teflon article could have provided
	creative inspiration for the mysterious Imipolex G in Gravity's
	Rainbow.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_6750/is_46-49/ai_n28819965/pg_12/?tag=content;col1

The following passage, read in light of "Teflon in Depth," is linked  
to both GR and Boeing/Rocketdyne. Note the alternation between the  
bombardment* at Gallipoli and the attack of the hairspray can, how the  
net effect of seeing the words on the page is so close to intercutting  
in films. It was a rather avante-garde trope back in 1966 to intercut  
between two otherwise unrelated scenes in a film:	

	She made the mistake of looking at herself in the full-length
	mirror, saw a beach ball with feet, and laughed so violently she
	fell over, taking a can of hair spray on the sink with her. The can
	hit the floor, something broke, and with a great outsurge of
	pressure the stuff commenced atomizing, propelling the can
	swiftly about the bathroom. Metzger rushed in to find Oedipa
	rolling around, trying to get back on her feet, amid a great sticky
	miasma of fragrant lacquer. "Oh, for Pete's sake," he said in his
	Baby Igor voice. The can, hissing malignantly, bounced off the
	toilet and whizzed by Metzger's right ear, missing by maybe a
	quarter of an inch. Metzger hit the deck and cowered with
	Oedipa as the can continued its high-speed caroming; from the
	other room came a slow, deep crescendo of naval
	bombardment, machine-gun, howitzer and small-arms fire,
	screams and chopped-off prayers of dying infantry. She looked
	up past his eyelids, into the staring ceiling light, her field of
	vision cut across by wild, flashing overflights of the can, whose
	pressure seemed inexhaustible. She was scared but nowhere
	near sober. The can knew where it was going, she sensed, or
	something fast enough, God or a digital machine, might have
	computed in advance the complex web of its travel; but she
	wasn't fast enough, and knew only that it might hit them at any
	moment, at whatever clip it was doing, a hundred miles an hour.
	"Metzger," she moaned, and sank her teeth into his upper arm,
	through the sharkskin. Everything smelled like hair spray. The
	can collided with a mirror and bounced away, leaving a silvery,
	reticulated bloom of glass to hang a second before it all fell
	jingling into the sink; zoomed over to the enclosed shower,
	where it crashed into and totally destroyed a panel of frosted
	glass; thence around the three tile walls, up to the ceiling, past
	the light, over the two prostrate bodies, amid its own whoosh
	and the buzzing, distorted uproar from the TV set. She could
	imagine no end to it; yet presently the can did give up in mid-
	flight and fall to the floor, about a foot from Oedipa's nose. She
	lay watching it.
	CoL49, 24/25

This line: "The can knew where it was going, she sensed, or something  
fast enough, God or a digital machine, might have computed in advance  
the complex web of its travel" makes more sense knowing that Boeing  
was involved wih the development of some of the first computer   
programs and equipment for tracking rockets & computing their  
trajectories. Some of the first computer graphics programs were being  
developed at Boeing during the time Pynchon was writing for Bomarc  
Service News:

	Boeing began using computers to aid in the building of
	airplanes in 1958. At that time, manufacturing created APT
	programs to describe parts shown on engineering drawings. . .

	http://tinyurl.com/ryouyd

	William Fetter was a graphic designer for Boeing Aircraft Co.
	and in 1960, was credited with coining the phrase "Computer
	Graphics" to describe what he was doing at Boeing at the time.
	(Fetter has said that the terms were actually given to him by
	Verne Hudson of the Wichita Division of Boeing.)
	As Fetter stated in a 1978 interview, "There has been a long-
	standing need in certain computer graphics applications for
	human figure simulations, that as descriptions of the human
	body are both accurate and at the same time adaptable to
	different user environment." His early work at Boeing was
	focused on the development of such ergonomic descriptions.
	 One of the most memorable and iconic images of the early
	history of computer graphics was such a human figure, often
	referred to as the "Boeing Man", but referred to by Fetter as the
	"First Man".

At the same time this also links to SHROUD & SHOCK in V. Note as well  
how the theme of  computers subsuming the human gets lots of play in  
CoL49. Remember how early 1966 is relative to  the development of the  
computer. V., from 1963,  displays many of the same themes. The fear  
of humans losing their innate "human-ness" is a major theme in early  
Pynchon:

http://tinyurl.com/oov7cu

*"You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another  
world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist  
peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm. . ."

The intrusion of the bullets from the Turks to the characters that  
earlier provided "My Daddy, My Doggie & Me"  is another world's  
intrusion into what first appeared to be the safe formula of a 1930's  
musical. The destruction of bathroom by hairspray can is yet another  
world's intrusion into the [usually] safe environs of a Motel. Think  
as well of the bombardment of gamma rays into SHROUD.