science-fiction-economic-collapse-Durban-Jason Velveeta

[Robert Mahnke]

Yes. In the midst of the worst recession in several decades, Obama is
coward for failing to stop climate change.  Congress, big business and
voters have nothing to do with it.  Obviously there is a deep and
well-organized desire on the part of the people of this country to dig into
their wallets to pay more for what they're already doing, and it is just a
pity that this one skinny man is failing to unleash all of that pent-up
demand for social change.  Let's blame him -- that's much more attractive
than some of the alternatives.

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Global  apartheid has been restored as the center of western civilization
> in Durban South Africa. Obama may go down - in whatever larger history
> remains to an oil addicted empire and  in whatever collective memory
> remains of those who inherited the beautiful climate balance that
> engendered human society - as the greatest coward America ever produced -
> Jason Velveeta masquerading as Martin King and elected President.  In a
> world already facing record weather disruptions, melting glaciers,  and
> growing dead zones like the Niger Delta and the Gulf of Mexico, Obama is
> choosing to effectively end the feeble but effective start represented in
> the Kyoto Protocols and says we can wait til 2020 to start thinking about
> maybe doing something about greenhouse emissions.   In Durban South Africa,
> a place where political independence has been earned at tremendous cost and
> against all odds, the kind of struggle that allowed Obama's presidency,
>  and now the site of the last hope for this generation of world leaders  to
> take a stand against turning the world into a long term greenhouse of
> hellish heat and storms, Obama is a pathetic no-show.  ( Yes, I am still
> firmly persuaded that the junior varsity pimp of IV, Jason Velveeta, is
> Pynchon's satiric sketch of Barack Obama)
>
> The sad thing is that there are many world class developments in the field
> of alternative energy and some of the best tinkerers are still in the US.
>  So here are 5 ways Pynchon uses scientific tinkering  in ATD  which
> concern relevant issues: 1)  alternative non polluting energy- Tesla  is
> used here not as  a magic answer , not as a safe, non-disruptive visionary,
> but as a genius whose aspiration to provide liberating alternative
> technologies was crushed and subverted by the capitalist paradigm, whose
> urge to use science for the benefit of all left behind  2) the
> transmutation of silver to Gold - having to do with alternative economic
> models and the relationship between value and labor( the silver has to be
> worked to become argentaurum/gold)  3) the use of silver as photographic
> mirror of a soul in time,  to see history accurately , to see reality not
> as a captive moment but a continuum   4) the implications of Icelandic spar
> as crystal using technology's(everything from spectrscopic analysis to
> cumputer tech to laser tech)  potential/ danger as a fork in every
> communication road the double refraction of light's messages. Something
> that can expand and enlighten or open a pandora's box of delusion. 5)  The
> unearthing of unintended consequences by extractive technologies in the
> search for Iceland Spar- One can't avoid seeing nuclear fission in this mad
> dash for new rays.   Also we find in the Vormance the dangerous
> interdependence between scientific research and colonial greed ala King
> Leopold .  ( the political and karmic  implications of Leopold's version of
> slave-labor capitalism is seen in  the industrialized  death that came to
> Belgium in WW1 and the even more dire implications of Nagasaki/Hiroshima.)
>
> *There is a scene in ATD where Professor Vanderjuice, a rare  liaison
> between the chums mythic world and the world the main characters inhabit,
> begins to lecture at Candlebrow U. (Pychon may not be as enthusiastic about
> higher education as Obama, characterizing CU as providing" exactly the
> mixture of nostalgia and amnesia to provide them a reasonable counterfeit
> of the Timeless." Gottingen and Yale come in for similar treatment.)
> Anyway the professor is lecturing about time and how the fundamental
> structure of everything is like a spinning vortex when a big cyclone shows
> up directly overhead.   This is where we are at today. Since the lecture
> began at the birth of scientific inquiry into the greenhouse effect in the
> late 1800s until now,  the correctness of those scientific concerns has
> gathered over all our heads like a harbinger of armageddon. Global warming
> and the contraction at the end of an oil fueled economy is no longer in the
> future.  The bankers and CEO's have taken refuge in the collective pockets
> of the safely colonized taxpayers . But the swirling vortex just gets
> bigger. The politicians are  telling us about  the high tech jobs of the
> future, the nimble recovery of the free markets, the importance of  finding
> and killing anything that might be thought of as a terrorist threat to the
> final glorious triumph of capitalism  while refusing to look up, down or
> anyplace else where they might find reality roiling like the biggest storm
> cloud in human history.    And the vortex gets bigger.  The priests of
> science say it's  just a minor course correction; the 3 priests of Abraham
> say  fight on, our side is about to win;  the priests of passivity say
> breathe deep,  and buy my latest book on how to be happy in a holocaust;
>  the priests of survivalism say they'll never get me, I got food for years
> and plenty of guns. But any way you look at it or lie about it , without a
> serious change a lot of people are going to get raped and kllled.  This can
> only be modified or actually remedied in a time frame that my mom used to
> call "RIGHT NOW!"  That is what mother earth is saying  and we are all too
> small, and too dependent to run away or hide. Also, as we are learning,
> there is no away. The distopian future of science fiction and 1984 and
> Brave new World  and Blade Runner have swirled together in day to day
> reality and are upon us.
>
>
> Was the choice of the name for the airship "Inconvenience"  in a novel
> released in November 2006 just conveniently coincidental with the movie An
> Inconvenient Truth, released in May 2006? Interestingly the movie poster
> features a swirling hurricane rising from a smokestack.* (see above)
> Below are my first thoughts on this general topic  with a few edits.  But
> enough already , no one responded to this one  and prolly about the same
> for above.
>
> On Dec 3, 2011, at 10:18 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
>
>
> > Another aspect of the chums and other characters in ATD that relates to
> the final scene and Pynchon's probing relationship to the concept of grace
> is the field of alternative technology.  I wonder if fiction isn't itself
> acknowledged throughout P as an alternative technology and a generator of
> same. There is plenty of Jules Verne in ATD. The  airships, like Popular
> Science do-it-yourself gadgetry taken to the next level, function with
> increasing autonomy on technologies that represent roads not taken in
> mainstream physics. They are also outside the rush of  high speed
> propulsive  fossil fuel tech. The ether winds of the imagination continue
> to blow long after Michaelson and Morley are dead and who knows when some
> tinkerer will figure how to power a turbine with such scientifically
> abandoned forces. The chums themselves are aging far more slowly than the
> rest of the planet's inhabitants.  This all could be looked at as silliness
> and a spoof of this genre's boys' adventure obsession with gadgets and
> science and the dreams of escape from the the gravitational pull of death.
> But let me turn to today's inconvenient truth and the grim lines of geo
> political power in a hothouse planet.
> >
> > Here is where certain kinds of technologies could make a huge difference
> in how physical power is available and therefor in how other kinds of power
> is distributed.. The struggle between Tesla and JP Morgan is still
> alive.The truth is that a change in how physical power is negotiated  has
> to happen or we will boil or nuke ourselves, competing over ways to fill
> the sky and waters with shit.  I think there is a constant toying in P's
> fiction with the interaction between technologies and the consciousness
> they engender. The paramorphoscope, one of the wittiest words ever invented
>  embodies this fusing of the spiritual/philosophical/karmic/duality/love
>  aspect of consciousness with the the scientific tools to evaluate the data
> map as it extends into the subatomic, the geophysical and the mysteries of
> light, matter, space, time, energy. MInd is the paramorphoscope and because
> it is a balance of female/male  east/west (up, out ,space)/ (down, in,
> matter),  water/air/fire energies it is dangerous when it is only the
> plaything of the boys and their competitive - mine is bigger than yours and
> I've got the oil rigs and   corporate jet to prove it and more nukes than
> you, too -mentality.  This  state of consciousness locks up the waters  of
> biospheric transmutation in underground caverns like tears unshed and
> rivers that never see light . Because oil has induced the worship of fire
> we live in a world where cities are visible from the moon; but where
> deserts,  dead zones(and desserts)  grow; and where gardens, glaciers  (and
> healthy food availbility) shrink .
> >
> > If Rossi's cold fusion energy catalyzer is real, ( Interestingly, it
> relies on hydrogen, the gas in the chums' gas bag, and nickel, one step
> down in from silver among  precious white metals)or as similar
> breakthroughs in safe sustainable non polluting energy makes power
> inexpensive, local or even personal in scale and universal in availability,
> and the  freshly locally empowered  peoples of the planet tell the
> war-mongers to shove it - well some new doors of consciousness may also
> open( may have already been opened),  new winds blow,  cleansing rains
> fall. Just sayin.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Dec 2, 2011, at 11:03 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
> > ( in response to the following M Bailey  response to M Kohuts initial
> questions and thoughts
> >
> >>> 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?
> >>
> >
> >> As some may recall, I think P projects his vision in 3 dimensions,
> separate but interactive:
> > Hey, it's right there on the cover,  3 layers,  with the light coming
> from the reader.
> >> 1) complete fiction/myth/imagination existing outside laws of physics
> and plausibility but true to their own mythos.  ie  the chums, the
> thanatoids, benny, Vaukanson's Duck, the rats in V, vieshu   2) the
> plausible fictive and  3)the actual historic :Tunguska, Nixon...
> >>
> >> The chums are the mythos of the boys adventure fiction from late 1800s
> to current times. One could trace their origins back to medieval knights
> and beyond, but there is a distinctively western and Christian quality to
> this corpus.  What changes in them is their relation to their author. First
> they are on missions for which they don't question the purpose or morality.
> They have rivals and enemies but don't ask why this is the relationship.
>  They are like their readers. They accept the authority and meanings
> assigned by the author. Male authority figures  with religion and science,
> age and money. The dominant mythos of the readers is Christian, western,
> and because sex is not safe for young boys they fly through the hollow
> earth and burrow through desert sands. Such innocence is fun but sinfully
> dangerous.  This is, however the world of a great many people; tell us who
> the bad guys are and we will fight them. By the end the Chums are their own
> authors, have come into equal relationships with women and are independent
> contractors .  In other words, after a lot of arguing and exploring and
> questions and the dark lessons of war  a new mythos has been negotiated and
> grace, that beautiful, terrifying, loaded word, has become something
> otherworldly in its humane chance of being normal.
>
>
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