science-fiction-economic-collapse

[Mark Kohut]

All interesting and an informative riff---Bowie must read fast---but what I meant with my post
was the whole big-as-a-civilization airship the married Chums create--and get independent in--
and whether that is a metaphor for how the world as we know it could have solved its scarcity
problem long ago IF ONLY as that paragraph in the Guardian piece argued......................
The New Airship is a world 'in which alll questiions are, if not answered, at least raised" or some
such.........

From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Friday, December 2, 2011 5:58 PM
Subject: Re: science-fiction-economic-collapse

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 4:48 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Interesting, Ian...
>
> This, from the article, leads me to ask if this paragraph may be part of the
> suggestive meanings to the Chumsworld airship civilization in AtD?
> The grace into which they are last seen flying into, between the Wars?
> An Iceland Spar-like, i.e.refracted from the known world, as/into an utopian 'world'?
>
> Discussion question of the day. Maybe?
>

I can't focus exactly on that, although if what you are saying is true
it sort of relates to the road not taken in CoL49; "yes there are 2
paths you can go by, but in the long run, there's still time to change
the road you're on..."
(tangent about readers among rockers - Page evidently a Crowley freak,
but, and possibly more hearteningly, was it here linked or somewhere
else in my rambles that I ran across an article on David Bowie's
reading habits?  Apparently whenever in New York, he'd buy all the
books reviewed in the NYRB and read them in his hotel room.  I always
suspected a keen brain on that thin white dude...)

but just on the flying toward grace passage in general, it's I suppose
natural that he ended the book with the Chums, since he began with
them as well.
So basically the Chums is the frame tale, sort of?  and their
progression by a commodious vicus of recirculation is from a voyage to
a specific destination (viz the Columbian exposition) to a generalized
movement toward grace.  What has changed in them?  Rather than
exhausting the genres, cutting and drying them, could the tale be
revivifying them?  and if so, how?  If a Chums-like stance is
suggested as a reader of the genre fictions, above them and but
partially involved in the emotions of those tales, the rest of one's
consciousness involved in aerial maneuvers and missions, how does one
read the Chums?
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