V-2nd C4 The Eternal Drama of Love and Death

[alice wellintown]

But this is V. not Gravity. Here, in V., the ivory belongs to Mr.
Kurtz. Young P is a modernist copy-cat still. What became of
modernism? Well, it had much to do with chaos of the modern
experience, of war, of alianation, of secularization and
fragmentation of the humanistic and chrisitian west, of the artist's
vestiages of human primacy held up by stilts (Dali), or Picasso,
pointing to his painting of what the Germans did to a
canvas--Guernica, or the screaming, not across the sky over your head
dear fewllow, but in the sky on the bridge.   V. is a modern work in
this tradition, although, obviously, the cold war and the bomb are in
the theater/theatre. The response to it, what makes GR, postmodern
(sorry the term is so corrupted, but what makes it not V. modern but
late modern if not post) is Gravity's Rainbow, a celebration of life's
triumph, of scatterr-brained mother Earth's fecund mystery that unites
all apparent binaries. This is not the case in V. V. is a binary
world, the V has a period. The sick crew never really hears the song
or follows the rainbow.


On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 12:52 PM, Ian Livingston
<igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> oops. the thing is not the thing it is until someone says it is so.
>
> On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 9:51 AM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Well, yeah, and what about his favorite, "excluded middles"? Seems to
>> me he sets up poles to emphasize the connections as much as the spaces
>> between them. The inanimate is not entirely so, nor is the animate
>> entirely so. Materialist v. idealist, whatever, matter and mind seem
>> ultimately inseparable when we allow for complexity. It seems to me
>> that only by way of reductionist argument is it possible to say that
>> one thing or another is what it is alone and without external
>> influence or interpretation. The thing is the thing it is until
>> someone says it is so. Or, as CG Jung suggests, maybe we project the
>> world in such a way there might be a soul in every stone.
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 1:51 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> It isn't fair, and Pynchon would have to be an idiot to literally
>>> think in these terms.  Far too many people take Pynchon's tropes and
>>> metaphors literally.  In fact at its deepest level this metaphor has
>>> to do with consciousness versus pre-consciousness,
>>> thought/analysis/language versus pure unmediated experience/"just
>>> being."
>>>
>>> All of this is much more thoroughly developed in GR, a book deeply
>>> immersed in Freudian (and Jungian) psychology.
>>>
>>> David Morris
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 2:45 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>>> Maybe I'm reading Pynchon wrong here.  But we know that he has issues with not just sound recording, but photography, film, and even the written word [hypocrite!].  In the long journey through all those vibrating tubes and electronic devices, some of the original gets sloughed off, deposited as waste, never to be recovered.  The objects that impart perfection to Godolphin's face now, will cause it to cave into something monstrous and inhuman later.  Inanimate doesn't mix with human.
>>>>
>>>> Of course, this isn't really fair.  The music reaches more people when it's (first) played out loud and (second) recorded.  And Godolphin's face was going to look pretty hell-ish anyway.  But these quibblings will get lost in the shuffle as Pynchon starts to move from dissing the inanimate to dissing the industrial, and the military-industrial.
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> "liber enim librum aperit."
>>
>
>
>
> --
> "liber enim librum aperit."
>