V2, Chap 15 (Sahha), I, p 464 - Flip and Flop

[Mark Kohut]

had completely forgotten chap 10 and flip flopping already...yes!

They are kinda like binary girls, either-or, interchangeable, like Hanky and 
Panky 
and, later in IV, the two stewardii, yes?...

Women who are not unique, not self-actualized individuals but circuitry-like...?


----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Ryan <himself at richardryan.com>
To: Pynchon-L <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, February 20, 2011 6:59:45 PM
Subject: V2, Chap 15 (Sahha), I, p 464 - Flip and Flop

"'I'm Flip,' said the blonde, 'and this is Flop.'

Pig groaned momentarily nostalgic for Hanky and Panky. 'Fine," he
said,  'That is Benny and I am - hyeugh, hyeugh - Pig.'

'Obviously,' said Flop. But the girl/boy ratio in Washington has been
estimated as high as 8 to 1. She grabbed Pig's arm, looking around the
room  as if those other spectral sisters were lurking somewhere among
the  statuary.

Their place was near P Street, and they had amassed every Pat Boone
record  in existence. Before Pig had even set down the large paper bag
containing  the fruits of their afternoon's sortie among the booze
outlets of the  nation's capital - legal and otherwise - 25 watts of
that worthy, singing Be  Bop A Lula, burst on them unaware."

********


COMMENTS: The "government girls" Flip and Flop don't serve much
obvious purpose other than to give Benny and Pig something to distract
themselves with while Stencil (possibly) conducts some sort of
unexplained business at the State Department.  The girls' names do,
however, hearken back to that striking and mysterious passage in
Chapter 10 when McClintic Sphere develops his concept, based on his
conversations with studio engineers, of flip-flopping - a kind of
binary version of karma or nemesis [the relevant passage - pp 319-320
in the Harper's Perennial Edition -  is copied below.]  I take the
passing entanglement with two girls named after a piece of electronic
circuitry to be one more sign of Benny's descent to a level of reality
on which his actions and the actions of those around them is at once
as random as a quantum state but likewise predetermined.

Flip and Flop's obsession with Pat Boone is symptomatic, one presumes,
of their generally de-spirtualized condition.


From Chap 10:

This word flip was weird. Every recording date of McClintic's he'd got
into  the habit of talking electricity with the audio men and
technicians in the  studio. McClintic once couldn't have cared less
about electricity, but now  it seemed if that was helping him reach a
bigger audience, some digging,  some who would never dig, but all
paying and those royalties keeping the Triumph in gas and McClintic in
J. Press suits, then McClintic ought to be  grateful to electricity,
ought maybe to learn a little more about it. So  he'd picked up some
here and there, and one day last summer he got around to  talking
stochastic music and digital computers with one technician.

Out of  the conversation had come Set/Reset, which was getting to be a
signature for  the group. He had found out from this sound man about a
two-triode circuit  called a flip-flop, which when it was turned on
could be one of two ways,  depending on which tube was conducting and
which was cut off: set or reset,  flip or flop.

'And that," the man said, "can be yes or no, or one or zero. And that
is  what you might call one of the basic units, or specialized 'cells'
in a big  'electronic brain.'

'Crazy," said McClintic, having lost him back there someplace. But one
thing  that did occur to him was 1f a computer's brain could go flip
and flop, why  so could a musician's. As long as you were flop,
everything was cool. But  where did the trigger-pulse come from to
make you flip?

McClintic, no lyricist, had made up nonsense words to go along with
Set/Reset. He sang them to himself sometimes on the stand, while the
natural  horn was soloing:

      Gwine cross de Jordan

       Ecclesiastically:

       Flop, flip, once I was hip,

       Flip, flop, now you're on top,

       Set-REset, why are we Beset

       With crazy and cool in the same molecule . . .'


'What are you thinking about,' said the girl Ruby.

'Flipping,' said McClintic.

"You'll never flip."

"Not me," McClintic said, "whole lot of people."

After a while he said, not really to her, "Ruby, what happened after
the  war? That war, the world flipped. But come '45, and they flopped.
Here in  Harlem they flopped. Everything got cool - no love, no hate,
no worries, no  excitement. Every once in a while, though, somebody
flips back. Back to  where he can love . . ."

"Maybe that's it," the girl said, after a while. "Maybe you have to be
crazy  to love somebody."

"But you take a whole bunch of people flip at the same time and you've
got a  war. Now war is not loving, is it?"

"Flip, flop," she said, "get the mop."

*******

From the WIkipedia entry on the flip-flop circuit:


The first electronic flip-flop was invented in 1918 by William Eccles
and F. W. Jordan.[1][2] It was initially called the Eccles–Jordan
trigger circuit and consisted of two active elements (vacuum
tubes).[3] Such circuits and their transistorized versions were common
in computers even after the introduction of integrated circuits,
though flip-flops made from logic gates are also common now....

Early flip-flops were known variously as trigger circuits or
multivibrators. A multivibrator is a two-state circuit; they come in
several varieties, based on whether each state is stable or not: an
astable multivibrator is not stable in either state, so it acts as a
relaxation oscillator; a monostable multivibrator makes a pulse while
in the unstable state, then returns to the stable state, and is known
as a one-shot; a bistable multivibrator has two stable states, and
this is the one usually known as a flip-flop. However, this
terminology has been somewhat variable, historically.

....According to P. L. Lindley, a JPL engineer, the flip-flop types
discussed below (RS, D, T, JK) were first discussed in a 1954 UCLA
course on computer design by Montgomery Phister, and then appeared in
his book Logical Design of Digital Computers.[11][12] Lindley was at
the time working at Hughes Aircraft under Dr. Eldred Nelson, who had
coined the term JK for a flip-flop which changed states when both
inputs were on. The other names were coined by Phister. They differ
slightly from some of the definitions given below. Lindley explains
that he heard the story of the JK flip-flop from Dr. Eldred Nelson,
who is responsible for coining the term while working at Hughes
Aircraft


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_%28electronics%29







-- 
Richard Ryan
New York and the World
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty
of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises.
    -- Hannah Arendt