NP? modernity, terrorism, truth and relevance? CORRECTED

Mon Apr 22 15:08:16 CDT 2013

Thanks for that, Bekah!

On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 3:25 PM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Oh aha!  Yes!    Big huge theme in DeLillo is viewer response to the media
> - especially but not limited to television and movies -  and its effect on
> individuals as well as on mass audiences,  especially of tragedies or
> "events" such as the Boston Marathon but not only that,  our fixation on
> these things.
>
> These are the books I've read:
>
> Running Dog  - footage of Hitler -  a man (men?)  obsessed with it.
> The Names -  I think I remember that the protagonist dealt with a
> filmmaker  - theme is more about the power of language.
> White Noise - effects of media coverage on individual fears
> Underworld -  TV and the Texas Highway Killer and other situations
> Libra  - Zapruder footage
> Mao II - relationship between mass events,  in person or filmed,  and
> identity - who controls the masses?
> Body Artist - does that woman hear things on the radio?
> Cosmopolis -  limo filled with television - mass events can interfere with
> progress for anyone -
> Falling Man -  9/11 - fixation of television coverage -  effects on
> individuals
> Point Omega - that Psycho thriller - museum footage  frame by frame in 24
> hour cycles -
> The Agent Esmeralda - several stories,  especially Baader-Meinhof (museum
> photos) and one story about the obsession with movies.
>
> His literary peer Thomas Pynchon has applauded DeLillo for “a voice as
> eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing.”
> http://www.salon.com/2001/10/23/delillo_4/
>
> THE writer to whom Mr. DeLillo has most often been likened and for whom he
> has great respect is Thomas Pynchon. ''Somebody quoted Norman Mailer as
> saying that he wasn't a better writer because his contemporaries weren't
> better,'' he says. ''I don't know whether he really said that or not, but
> the point I want to make is that no one in Pynchon's generation can make
> that statement. If we're not as good as we should be it's not because there
> isn't a standard. And I think Pynchon, more than any other writer, has set
> the standard. He's raised the stakes.''
> http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/lifetimes/del-v-talk1982.html
>
> http://english.uchicago.edu/content/pynchondelillo-and-problem-america
>
> Bekah
>
>
> On Apr 22, 2013, at 9:19 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Wow....a book by Karen Armstron only available in Pakistan????
> >
> > There is some story there.....
> >
> > Guy wrote DeLillo's Running Dogs theme was, among others, that we watch
> such things
> > as the Boston manhunt because we love motion on TV.....
> >
> > And just started a DeLillo I had not read, End Zone, and speed (of a
> running back) is a theme...
> >
> > Motion on TV and speed and I cannot help leaping to modernity
> tropes......
> >
> >
> > thanks for other DeLillo tips....
> > From: Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
> > To: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> > Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> > Sent: Monday, April 22, 2013 12:00 PM
> > Subject: Re: NP? modernity, terrorism, truth and relevance? CORRECTED
> >
> > The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions -
>  Karen Armstrong - 2006 /
> >
> > Good book - I read it awhile back and only remember the highlights.
>  Yes,  Amstrong discusses the term "axial age" problems associated with it.
> >
> > I'd be interested to read her newest book,  "A Letter to Pakistan,"  but
> it's only available in Pakistan.  I wonder what language it's written in
> and I wonder if it's really available there.  Oxford publishing.
> >
> > Bekah
> >
> >
> > On Apr 21, 2013, at 5:04 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > Of course Armstrong is correct. The excerpt could be misread, so one
> might think she fails to  attribute the term to Jaspers, but she does.
> Moreover, she is quite familiar, as she notes in her works, with the uses
> and controversial uses of the term.
> > >
> > > On Sunday, April 21, 2013, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
> > >
> > > Armstrong:
> > >
> > > "There was a similar transitional period in the ancient world, lasting
> roughly from 700 to 200 BCE, which historians have called the Axial Age
> because it was pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity."
> > >
> > > Not correct. It weren't historians yet the philosopher Karl Jaspers
> (see Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte) who minted the term Achsenzeit
> in 1949. And in later years the concept attracted rather social scientists
> (like Eisenstadt) than historians to whom the concept must appear highly
> speculative.
> > >
> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age
> > >
> > > An actual historian who thought a lot about this kind of concept in
> order to shed new light on modernity was Reinhart Koselleck who developed
> the term 'saddle time' (Sattelzeit) for the period between 1750 and 1850.
> Sounds M&Dish, right?
> > >
> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhart_Koselleck
> > > http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sattelzeit
> > >
> > > On 20.04.2013 22:23, alice wellintown wrote:
> > >>
> > >> http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/a/armstrong-battle.html
> > >> On Saturday, April 20, 2013, Mark Kohut wrote:
> > >> " But all of our experience suggests that it is not “fundamentalism”
> alone but an aching tension between modernity and a false picture of a
> purer fundamentalist past that makes terrorists."
> > >>
> > >> This is Adam Gopnick in The New Yorker today about the marathon
> bombers. Does this apply to any of P's characters in AtD?
> > >> Does this apply to P's vision? Is Hume's condemning what she sees as
> P's moral failure in Against the Day, refuted, or attempted
> > >> to be seen (refuted) by P's vision of the cohesion of life in the
> Olde Europe scenes---the communities of the villages?
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> Or, a few have remarked that DeLillo best captured the meanings and
> understandings of the characters in our recent acts of local terror. True,
> where?
> > >> You can answer this question instead.
> > >>
> > >> Extra credit for both.
> > >>
> > >>
> > >
> >
> >
> >
>
>

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