Good Morning from Manhattan Beach, 1970. Chap. 16, the IV of IV

[John Bailey]

"Like spacemen in a space ship, they were pressed violently into the
seat backs as Tito engaged some classified performance feature, and
outside the windows city neon began to lengthen in long spectral
blurs, to shift toward blue ahead while in the black distances framed
by Tito's mirror each point of light grew reddish, receded,
converged."

This is classic Pynchon - physics-related talk centring on the light
spectrum and velocity and cars and, perhaps, time travel, but framing
it in something from a trashy SF movie/tv show. The image of the
points of light becoming lines reminds me mostly of Star Wars, but are
there any more relevant references to older tv shows which created
that image of hyperspeed or whatever through the same technique? I
have a vague memory of it but I aint that much of a SF buff.

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 8:09 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't even know how to watch cricket.
>
>  The note I posted on the depth of character analysis necessitated by
> the development of the novel and its elements including
> characterization, that is, how authors construct characters, as it
> strove to reflect the chaotic and violent modern and then postmodern
> world, also applies, as I suggested, to the plot line, and we can see
> that the two are inextricably tied to that Thai-weed balloon that
> Bertrand Russell sets his drugged balloonist in at the start of his
> ABC of Relativity (see the post on Eno and Russell and Thai Weed and
> talking backward).
>
> Pynchon confuses matters further by cutting thing up and splicing them
> together in a kaleidoscopic time tunnel. To add confusion to chaos, he
> alludes to scientific theories that were not yet developed at the time
> his novel is ostensibly set. The TV allsuion to Darren, where the time
> travel paradox theory (Novikov self-consistency principle),  operates,
> anachronistically, brings Sahasta in her Country Joe T-shirt into/onto
> the Wavo. Nothing has changed? Tropics of Capricorn! Where is that
> little buddy, Bigfoot?
>
>
> At the end of every episode, Tony and Doug always magically reverted
> to the same cleaned, pressed clothes: a green turtleneck sweater and a
> pair of gray slacks for Tony, and a conservative Norfolk suit for
> Doug. Doug never takes off his tie (although he loosens it
> occasionally). Doug's clothes were originally meant for the 1912
> Titanic, but the suit somehow changes to being contemporary style in
> future episodes.
>
> For it became very early evident to us that what was the matter with
> the Novel, and the British novel in particular, was that it went
> straight forward, whereas in your gradual making acquaintanceship with
> your fellows you never do go straight forward. You meet an English
> gentleman at your golf club. He is beefy, full of health, the moral of
> the boy from an English Public School of the finest type. You
> discover, gradually, that he is hopelessly neurasthenic, dishonest in
> matters of small change, but unexpectedly self-sacrificing, a dreadful
> liar, but a most painfully careful student of lepidoptera and,
> finally, from the public prints, a bigamist who was once, under
> another name, hammered on the Stock Exchange.... Still, there he is,
> the beefy, full-fed fellow, moral of an English Public School product.
> To get such a man in fiction you could not begin at his beginning and
> work his life chronologically to the end. You must first get him in
> with a strong impression, and then work backwards and forwards over
> his past.... That theory at least we gradually evolved.
>
> Ford Madox Ford on Conrad.
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 2:00 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Hey, someone has to post whatever to that wiki....Do it.