M&D c50 The Golem

[bandwraith at aol.com]

Ha, ha, Yes! But they have been simmering in The Pot, along with everything else, for awhile now- strange stew. What, or where, on this god-forsaken globe can we turn for a sense of The New? I would maintain, american to the core, that it's still America. Gangnum Style, as cool as it is, would not exist but for America. Likewise Samsung without Apple. And as pathetic as he be, Kim Jung un is as american as apple pie. He just hasn't realized it yet.

Oh we're weird, but we're still free, despite our best efforts.



-----Original Message-----
From: Lemuel Underwing <luunderwing at gmail.com>
To: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
Cc: bandwraith <bandwraith at aol.com>; pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Fri, Apr 5, 2013 7:33 pm
Subject: Re: M&D c50 The Golem


Also, the wonderful bit about Golem-making being a Vital Part of the Gospel of Christ, because he was known to have made clay pigeons and animated them through the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (far from canonical). This may represent a wide and unique range of American Religious experience that tended, perhaps, to the Heretical. Tho' through the influence of the Christian Right these experiences now seem so mundane that we forget at length just how Strange many early American Christian Beliefs were at one time.




On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 6:29 PM, Lemuel Underwing <luunderwing at gmail.com> wrote:


All that sounds Good Enough but what about a potential American Religiosity represented in the Golem...?
I honestly have a hard time seeing it, in the context of the chapter, as Technology merely,--  related to Dixon by Kabbalist-Frontiersmen as a Creation of the Natives, who are of the Lost Tribes of Israel (a smacking of Joseph Smith perhaps), that says "Ayer Asher Ayer". Dixon, ever the Quaker and quasi-Spiritualist himself, is apprehensive about the story being just another "Frenchman's Duck", another veiled Allegory for emerging technology(?), until the Booming can be heard.


of Course it soon becomes a Companion of the Great Timothy Tox...


It seems to me to represent more a keen American Sense of being Divinely Protected, perhaps? Some unique manifestation of the Holy invisible Ghost..



  






On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 9:47 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

 
 “The function of science fiction is not only to predict the future, but to prevent it."   Ray Bradbury 


On Wednesday, April 3, 2013, wrote:

A' and it's worth pointing out that if Doc Frankenstein would've just cut the monster a little slack and exercised a little responsibility for his creation, things might have turned out better. Is it too late? I'd like to know.



-----Original Message-----
From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
To: bandwraith <bandwraith at aol.com>
Cc: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, Apr 3, 2013 10:09 pm
Subject: Re: M&D c50 The Golem


Mary Shelly resurrected the Golem most nobly. And it still has legs. 


Frankenstein is about hubris, as is the Golem.
Technology is Modern Hubris.


David Morris

On Wednesday, April 3, 2013, wrote:

It has to be technology, no? But not just nuts and bolts (thru the neck), but in the ephemeral and awesome, and especially, American sense, as in Leo Marx's, "Machine in the Garden," or, David Nye's, "American Technological Sublime." There's a tendril to O Boy, A' and to King Lud- Big and bad, but not evil, at least not in the mythos of Americanism, as it had developed up till recent times. Most of the news clips didn't show it, but in a few grainy, bootleg, early digital videos, if you look closely, you can just make out a big hairy arm clinging to the top of the north tower. 



-----Original Message-----
From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
To: Lemuel Underwing <luunderwing at gmail.com>
Cc: “pynchon-l at waste.or 
g“ <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, Apr 3, 2013 9:14 pm
Subject: Re: M&D c50 The Golem


Heard of Google?

On Wednesday, April 3, 2013, Lemuel Underwing wrote:

What is the Golem? Is it "the" American Religion? 
















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