relatives of grigori, Pointsman, Slothrop

[Tom Beshear]

I recently watched a video on YouTube of an octopus walking on land --  
he/she was crossing from one pool to another. It was like seeing some 
creature from Lovecraft come to life, except kind of cute, since it was 
maybe a foot tall at its most upright.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joseph Tracy" <brook7 at sover.net>
To: "Pynchon Mailing List" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2011 12:19 PM
Subject: relatives of grigori, Pointsman, Slothrop


No one needs to respond to this. My paranoia is put to rest.

There is a good article in Orion Magazine about octopi and current 
studies/knowledge about these really oddly intelligent creatures .
1) they change color and have some optical receptors in their skin
2) if an arm is cut off it will still grab food and try to put it where the 
mouth would have been.
3)they can solve physical puzzles and even open child proof containers
 all this and more

I'm re-reading GR and was struck by some parallels to Naomi Klein's Shock 
Doctrine. This is one example:
For those who have not read  Shock Doctrine, it describes the history of a 
Canadian Doctor in the 50s who did research for the CIA's MK Ultra program 
giving very severe shock treatments, sensory deprivation and overload etc. 
to patients with the intent of wiping out their personalities and creating a 
"clean slate" which he intended to set aright with positive thinking style 
tape messages. What bears a striking resemblance to human experiment stories 
in GR with  Pointsman, Jamf,  Slothrop, Katje children in Klein's account is 
the story of a Canadian woman who was a nurse with only very minor 
psychological cconcerns/issues who was roped into these studies. She was 
subjected to a particularly intense battery of shock treatments and sensory 
abuse. She was released in a barely functional state and began a lifelong 
process of figuring out what happened to her. Her memories were gone and she 
was in real bad shape. She married a concentration camp victim with whom she 
had much in common. She  read an article decades later after  the 
experiments  were exposed by Canadian right-to-know laws and finally 
discovered what had happened to her.  Her pursuit of truth, and her 
instincts about where that truth might lie  reminded me of Pynchon stories, 
particularly GR and Slothrop.
 The only use of the experiments was the US 60 year employment of enhanced 
interrogation techniques .