more prolegomena to V. : 1962 and more 1963

[Alex Colter]

Tho' slightly off-topic, I would like to recommend Burgess' Nothing Like the
Sun, as it seems, compared to A Clockwork Orange, woefully under-read.
It could be 'his' M&D if one conjures GR as being someways kin to A
Clockwork Orange...?
Just an excellent book, 'sall i'm saying...
On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> MK changes Ian to:
> But if V. was largely finished in '61...?
>
>     * That he {Burgess] had overheard the phrase "as queer as a clockwork
> orange" in a London pub in 1945 and assumed it was a Cockney expression.¹ In
> Clockwork Marmalade, an essay published in the Listener in 1972, he said
> that he had heard the phrase several times since that occasion. However, no
> other record of the expression being used before 1962 has ever appeared.[4]
> Kingsley Amis notes in his Memoirs (1991) that no trace of it appears in
> Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Historial Slang.
>     * His second explanation was that it was a pun on the Malay word orang,
> meaning "man". However, the novel contains no other Malay words or links.[4]
>     * In a prefatory note to A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music, he
> wrote that the title was a metaphor for "...an organic entity, full of juice
> and sweetness and agreeable odour, being turned into an automaton."[4] In
> his essay, "Clockwork Oranges" ², Burgess asserts that "this title would be
> appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian or mechanical
> laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and
> sweetness". This title alludes to the protagonist's positively conditioned
> responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will.
>
> Again, I think I remember TRP finding and expressing lacks in Partridge's
> Dictionary.....
>
> Burgess's mistress, Lhianna Marcella, I think, later his wife, was a TRP
> reader and later translated GR, I believe. She "met" Anthony via his writing
> (when
> she recognized the similarity in two pseudonymous early works he sent when
> she was with a publisheror agent) but they did not seem to meet in person
> until 1963. However, who knows whether she and Candida, TRP's agent,
> exchanged any manuscripts manuscripts?
>
> That pavlovian or mechanical laws metaphor SURE came alive in GR...with or
> without the word "clockwork"...for exactly those free will or wha?
> reasons....so to speak.
>
> And the phrase 'clockwork universe' came from Descartes, that
> Enlightment rationalist whom TRP gleefully savages in AtD...
> Descartes' universe was a mechanical ('wind-up') clockwork robot universe,
> with energy only as the property of matter being in motion and nothing other
> than ...
> www.new-science-theory.com/rene-descartes.html- Cached- Similar
>
> A notable exclusion from this theory [Clockwork Universe theory] though is
> free will, since all things have already been set in motion and are just
> parts of a predictable machine. Newton feared that this notion of
> "everything is predetermined" would lead to atheism[citation needed].
>
> undermined by one of our favorite Pynchon concepts:
>
> This theory was undermined by the second law of thermodynamics ( the total
> entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time,
> approaching a maximum value) and quantum physics with its unpredictable
> random behavior.
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 6:28 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> > Clockwork Orange (the novel) was published in 1962.  Not necessarily any
> thematic connection, but the phrase may have got Pynchon's wheels turning.
>  Lots of clockwork imagery in V.
> >
> > Laura
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> >>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> >>Sent: Jun 9, 2010 7:14 PM
> >>To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> >>Subject: Re: more prolegomena to V. : 1962 and more 1963
> >>
> >>
> >>Continuing the post on 1963 first, here is some more from that year:
> >>
> >>         --March on Washington
> >>         --MLKjr. I Have a Dream speech
> >>
> >>         --Assassination of America's Fisher-King, JFK, of course, in
> November
> >>
> >>         --for the first time, freshman females in the US answer a
> longstanding goals poll by not putting
> >>marriage w white picket fence house and kids first. (still want that, but
> adventure, travel, chance
> >>to be single awhile comes first)
> >>
> >>1962
> >>
> >>           Rwanda and Burundi gain independence.
> >>    * Supporters of Algerian independence win 99% majority in a
> referendum. De Gaulle grants independence to Algeria.
> >>    * A heavy smog develops over London. [Digression but it is easy
> enough to see this, sea-changed by a genius, as the giant adenoid in GR,
> yes? ]
> >>
> >>      Tanganyika and Uganda become independent within the Commonwealth.
> >>
> >>      ['nother digression: Rolling Stones play first gig. Times they are
> a changing, of course]
> >>
> >>      Anti-Mosley- [the fascist]  crowd disrupts a right-wing Union Club
> public gathering.
> >>
> >>     Ranger 4 rocket crashes on the moon. JFK affirms that the US will
> land a man on the moon before the decade ends.
> >>
> >>     Cuban missile crisis, October.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> "liber enim librum aperit."
>
>
>
>
>
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