More AtD correspondences, kute or otherwise, from The Proud Tower

[grladams at teleport.com]

Nice finds.
I've been musing about the decline of culture alot lately. I don't know if
this sort of thing necessarily runs thru heads more after reading Pynchon.
And someone could start talking about Entropy but I'm no physics expert.
But when we are inside the text I often interpret it to be ..oh, the Author
thinks the way I think, when in reality he may be totally disinterested,
writing expertly wthout axe in hand far from grindstone. But for Pynchon
not only could decline of culture be a very mathematical concept, it also
produces for me today, a swinging polar ambivalence, in regarding what I
think about culture decline, like ... earth and population's footprint..
corruption in speculation and investments.. anarchism in society and
terrorism.. and other decliney topics? It's a struggle for me, because I
feel boxed in by codes of speech about these things today -- so much has
transpired in the past century to deal with culture decline, which has
backfired. Like Jim Crow, Prohibition, Sterilization, these things are
damned.

Well anyway it's still engagig to hear an old libertine tongue when
speaking about "Kids today"-- it would be fascinating to see what he said.
Maybe in a nutshell we've become politically correct. But just somehow in
this moment, I am comforted that even in 1893 they might have struggled
with deline too.

-Jill

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Mark Kohut markekohut at yahoo.com
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:21:22 -0700 (PDT)
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: More AtD correspondences, kute or otherwise, from The Proud Tower


Speaking of entropy, shannon or otherwise,

in 1893 a book called Degeneration by one Max Nordau swept European
intellectual circles for the next
few years....

"Through 600 pages of mounting hysteria Nordau traced the decline of
culture".. through all the cultural forms 
[in detail] ,,,,combining to produce a society "marching to its certain
ruin because it is too worn out a flaccid
to perform great tasks.".......

Remember our discussion of the color 'yellow' in the Cyprian sections of
AtD?
In an aside on Oscar Wilde, Ms. Tuchman alludes to yellow as 'the color of
decadence in fin-di-siecle Europe"  



----- Original Message ----
From: Henry M <scuffling at gmail.com>
To: Pynchon Liste <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, March 31, 2010 4:14:35 PM
Subject: NP: Pictish Inscriptions

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=information-age-math-find
s-code-in-2010-03-31

AsB4,

Henry Mu
http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20



      

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