Science Against the Day Labor

[Bekah]

I was thinking a similar thing about distance,  but from the pov of the reader.  To someone in Kasane, Botswana TRP's California books might be really exotic.  To someone in California, circa 2006 parts of the pastiche of AtD are exotic.  To anyone reader the experience of Slothrop is exotic.  The natives and Jesuits sections of M&D  are probably some of the most exotic stuff TPR has written.    So to someone in almost any downtown area in the  US  the first page of BE is not going to feel the same distance as he will reading some page from the middle of V. or any other non-California Pynchon book.  (That said,  I really enjoyed Vineland but it was my first Pynchon so …) 

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Also,  how in the world can we tell where a book which starts out on a normal spring day in NYC will not end up in the labyrinthian sewer and Starbucks home-offices of unemployed Wall Street techies?     Look to  Pattern Recognition possibly with a political bend. ?   

Bekah



On Apr 16, 2013, at 1:42 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> Isn't it the distance of the author as well? In other words, the closer P gets to his own space and time the weaker his narratives, characters, prose style, themes ... his writing and story telling. So, Mondaugen's Story, and the SWA chapters are by far the best of his V. novel. It's not that the Benny in the Navy, out of the Navy, in NY chapters are not wonderful firts novel stories, but the SWA, and yhe Malta chapters are much better. CL49 is not great. It has been made into the cannonical cul-de-sac par excellence by the academy, but it is top heavy with fiction-making ideas and can't and won't hold up. GR, of course, is a materpiece. Not perfect, but in it the author hits a magical note and blows the roof off the theatre/theater.
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> That distance, not the readers, but the writers, serves Pynchon well. No?
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> On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 10:02 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> re: BE
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> I wonder if the folks who loved Pynchon's reconstruction of 1970 LA where I thought there was more of wow I remember that than wow I've never read anything like that before will feel about BE, NYC 2001. If you weren't there, will it still be as fascinating?
> fwiw.. when I started to recognize things Delillo mentions in his later books, small things, guys selling stuff on the street, guys I've seen alot with my own eyes, for example, his books became less mysterious and therefore not as interesting. 
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> I hope that doesn't happen with BE but the excerpt would lead one to believe is another light-hearted attempt, dialogue heavy--you know here kids will be ok and she'll have many a scrape, and be plucky and annoying.
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> what I find sad is reading it, Pynchon has moved closer to the mainstream writers. Coover's book sounds alot more interesting:
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> The Brunist Day of Wrath, Robert Coover's long-awaited, massive sequel to his award-winning debut, is a committed and committing, awe-inspiring, humbling look at fundamentalisms of all sorts in a world where religion competes with money, common sense, despair, and reason; stranded in their midst is beauty, is art.
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> "Jesus loves me, this I know, For the Bible tells me so . . . " The young Reverend Joshua J. Jenkins, candidate for the West Condon Presbyterian ministry, whushing along through the rain-drenched countryside, the bus nosing out of lush farmlands and dark wet forests onto the gently undulant and somewhat barren coal basin that is to be, if his interview goes well, his new home, finds himself meditating upon his church's Great Awakening—a great disaster, as he was taught (he himself is just awaking from a thick early-morning doze, his head fallen against the bus window, muddled dreams of collegial dispute)—and upon the sequence of disruptive church schisms and rationalist heresies that followed upon the Awakening's excessive evangelism through the convulsions of the American nineteenth century, so shaped by Presbyterian thought (and, one might say, confused by it as well), out of which musings he hopes to craft his inaugural sermon, and humming meanwhile that children's hymn of simple faith . . .
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> On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 6:52 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Readers of Pynchon works know that his first novel includes the incredible story of an engineer who travels to Africa. That story, and the astounding short, "The Secret Integration" are satires of the use/abuse, and ultimately, the disaterous failure of science and math to plumb the complexities of life and to use its abstractions to order and control, to silence, and make a pornography of,  the beautiful songs of Earth.
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> So how, in P's development did we get to GR and Blicero. Well, we need to look into CL49. The inventor, the scientist, the inventor, the bureaucrat-engineer.
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> Before we do, let me say that I was glad to see P take up Labor in Vinland. I had argued that this was his theme, but until VL showed up, it was a difficult thesis to support. But I was, as were many, disappointed in this work, as I have been in all of his california works, and, as I suspect I will be in BE.
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> On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 5:58 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> If God does not, as Milton sez in his famous sonnet, exact day labor light denied, this hasn't prevented men from exacting day labor from men, light, and even life, denied. Science was not much around to make safe the lives of the working men and women we read about in AGTD. Empirical practice was the method adopted, trial and selection, the railroad, the mines, the textile mills, these had not science, and many lives were lost because safety valves were not devised or employed to protect workers from exploding steam machines. Sure, science would have made things safer, better, if not for the workers, for the bosses  and their bosses, but for safety it was the men who worked the mines the factories who improved the work, the conditions, the safety. Even the laws of mechanical motion were not trumped by these pragmatic and practical men who worked, for the most part, without math or the scientific method. But once science began to apply its method, like a man with a hammer who sees a nail in every grain of sand, science applied its "scientific" method to every inch of man and to every hair and every grain of sand. And so, science, systematically, took over, from religion, from all other institutions of culture, and to all inquires, to thought itself, to every mode of investigation, and it claimed to have a better method for advancing all human persuits and objectives, even the destruction of all human pursuits and objectives. Moreover, not satisfied with using tools, extensions of human power, to improve the human lot, to add human tools and science to the existing patterns of life, as, say a farmer with a tool in his hand, science fashioned organisms, including man, for machaniisms, for machines. So, the huge farms, where science applied its method to plants and animals, and the huge hospitals (white visitation) where science applied its methods to human minds, and the huge, world wars where it applied its killing machines, machines that a man might fly in, if he were fashioned to it and not the other way round. This is Blicero's launch!
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