Way-out, Saturday party-time, plist-type open-ended question....grounded in Puritanism maybe?

Matthew Cissell macissell at yahoo.es
Mon Jun 25 06:27:48 CDT 2012


Paul,

I neither hate nor love the technologies and industries of Big B, I simply maintain them with very guarded suspicion. Life is absurd, but that doesn't mean swallowing everything. Let's not be chumps.

Alice,

I'm not sure of which faith you refer to so I'll refrain from comment, but as for that rock, I don't recall Albert using that metephor to talk about Big B. The burden of existence might involve dealing with Big B but it doesn't seem to be in the fore if Camus' mind. And, to continue with the borrowed metaphor, who's to say that the stone we push in our modern world is not in small part the burden of woman and man's nearly powerless suspicion and eternally required vigilance of Big B? I ask you to read the rocky slope of those granite corporate towers and tell me what you see or if you even see anything at all.

Now let me add that I am not anti-business neither big nor small. As I am quick to remind some of my European colleagues, some of whom would try to argue that governments are better at innovation and effecient research and operations (absurd), big business is absolutely necessary, but that doesn't mean always letting it do what it wants how it wants. That would be closer to corporatism, the other name that Il Duce provided for his fascismo.

yaws
mc otis



----- Original Message -----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Cc: 
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2012 12:23 PM
Subject: Re: Way-out, Saturday party-time, plist-type open-ended question....grounded in Puritanism maybe?

>  Big Business (and other technologies): love them and hate them in equal
> measure. Life is absurd.

So keep the faith, keep that stone rolling, and smile, Sysiphus. Smile
or die: --->
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo

So what happened to such positive thinking about the liberating
qualities of Big Business and technics? Well, we wax and wane on
these; the cause may be Puritan, though looking to Europe it seems the
Puritans are more adept and more adapted to the ethic of capitalism's
machine than their Catholic brothers and sisters to the south, but
anyways, we can see that creative destruction and the instruments of
this force, no longer bombs so much as computer worms and
derrivitives, when in the hands of dehumanized or dehumanizing people,
or their couter-force, may threaten us all. So, what is the use of
soap and the washing machine, if it liberate the poor and powerless
from the drudgery of the rock and riverside blues only to free them to
fight proxy wars in the backward states where religious luddites still
stone women to death for failing to get the blood and sperm out of the
sheets ?

Another fear, and it is based in reality, is that the other
institutions of power cannot keep pace with the new instruments of
technics; this is evident on Wall street and in the Valley, where
financial and computer technics are running far ahead of our
governments and courts.




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