Hannah Maxine Arendt and Martin Horst Windust Heidegger Loeffler

[Fiona Shnapple]

As usual, JB, some great stuff here, on debt you are right. Of course
this novel is about debt, and equity. Its about how capital is raised
and leveraged to build towers of real estate and then bring them down.

But, and this is not a minor point,  Horst doesn't work in, on, at, or
for the stock market.

He trades in the pits of Chicago. He's a pit trader. He trades
commodities. And Pynchon doesn't do a Hollywood Slop job on Horst, or
anything in this book. BE ain't no Wall Street the Movie or Trading
Places. P does he research. He doesn't play loose with the facts or
details. Stocks and commodities are very different animals.


I know, a Marxist might say, we're all commodities now buddy, but I'm
not talking materialism, or metaphysical, I'm talking about the man's
work.


Someone, probably Alice, posted a book about pit traders and I highly
recommend it for those who want to understand Horst and how he is so
different from Ice. Of course, the NY pits are in the WTC, but P
doesn't put Horst in the NY Pits, Pits that were blasted with a bomb
before, he puts him on the top floors. He has him bring the boys up to
the Windows. Horst is gonna be buggy whipped anyway; the computer
geeks are taking over the Pits.



On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 5:45 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Horst works the stock markets.
>
> This makes me think of the memorable Chicago stockyards scenes in ATD:
> "From this height is was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past,
> had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing
> cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped
> freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at
> right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final
> turn through the final gate that led to the killing-floor."
>
> And the equally memorable line from M&D: "Cities begin upon the day
> the Walls of the Shambles go up, to screen away Blood and
> Blood-letting, Animals' Cries, Smells and Soil..."
>
> Stock markets aren't exactly stockyards but both need shambles. Both
> need a certain distance and barrier between us and the stock. The
> stock market system involves investors and corporations who are kept
> separate, their exchanges brokered by people like Horst. This allows
> for all sorts of big business stuff to happen that probably makes some
> lives better and is just a fact of our world in any case, but also
> legitimises all kinds of awfulness done with the monies of people who
> don't know what they're helping fund. We don't want to know where our
> sausages come from.
>
> The stock market system (and the modern banking system) also effaces
> our understanding of debt. Where once borrowing carried a moral
> element - being unable to repay a debt could mean your lender's family
> table would go bare - now neither borrower nor lender sees their
> transaction as an ethical one. The only moral imperative is to help
> out your own by way of profit. This is why dot-com bubbles burst and
> global finances crisis-ise.
>
> BE is very interested in debt, I'd say. I don't think it's so
> interested in the sausage factor per se, but you have to ask whether
> Horst knows what happens on the other side of the shambles he works at
> or whether he just passes things over the fence. That even he, the
> broker, the hawala, might not know what the corporations he trades
> with are up to is a pretty scary truth when you think about it. We
> give them our money because of magic.
>
> On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 9:10 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I wrote: Hannah kept fucking fascists....after the war.....see Charisma,
>> that disease......
>>
>> Just an observation on what I know of Hannah Arendt: she kept fucking Martin
>> after the war, and other powerful men....
>> and I was alluding to P's line in Gravity's Rainbow about the terrible
>> disease of Charisma which near the postwar
>> riff in that masterpiece.
>>
>> Even Hannah could not resist a charismatic thinker.....love is strange as TP
>> always quotes.....
>>
>> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
>> To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Monday, December 2, 2013 12:53 AM
>>
>> Subject: Re: Hannah Maxine Arendt and Martin Horst Windust Heidegger
>> Loeffler
>>
>> T P's  names often have different angles.  I  am not saying Horst is an evil
>> Nazi, but trying to understand what P is doing with the fascist male(
>> Windust) fucks  lefty female sex riff. It's clearly here again and the Horst
>> Wessel Lied is not that big of a leap in this case. I think Pynchon is
>> trying to get at dual attractions that are dividing the country and have
>> marked our history.  I get that Maxine is physically attracted to Horst  and
>> said so by saying he rocked her boat.  Horst is a handsome provider who
>> loves his boys and Maxine, and he also spends a lot of time mindlessly zoned
>> out. He provides by tapping into the "magic of the market" with his own
>> magic. Maxine loves his stability and security but also is clearly
>> questioning the reality of it all and is a bit bored by the whole setup.
>> Unfortunately these dual attractions  in the American psyche are about more
>> than kinky sex or movie star looks. They are in fact about the darkest
>> tendencies  and seductions both of individuals and the empire and that is a
>> big part of the reason P comes back to the same trope so often.  This
>> indulgence of fascism  has consequences and there are many indications  that
>> one of the themes  of BE is payback or blowback, as David Morris suggested
>> quoting key passages from a key paragraph.
>>
>> p.340    "terrible black ash billowing [...] that was the moment [...] When
>> everything was revealed [...] a rush of blackness and death. Showing us what
>> we've become, what we've been all the time. [...] living on borrowed time".
>> [...] and meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the
>> innocent dead.  Boo fucking hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent.
>> There's no uninnocent dead."[...]
>> "it's a koan."    This koan mean its opposite.  None of our dead are
>> innocent. We all are due a payback. We all share a mountain of collective
>> guilt.
>>
>> To me this points to a thoughtlessness and violence in the American Empire
>> that is shrugged off when the bombs are falling elsewhere. It is very
>> comfortable here to turn instead to the latest stock market returns or spy
>> movie( to choose some loaded possibilities). Pg 340 and the falling towers
>> is the place where this mindless acceptance of violence suddenly becomes
>> shocked outrage when it blows back on innocent little us . But innocence is
>> a dubious claim for humans and soon the dead become new tools of violence
>> and propaganda as we all have seen.
>>
>> The whole cycle is personal too. He/She loves the person who is "in charge",
>> "powerful", even predatory, uniformed with some expression of state power
>> and prestige. Or she/he is challenged by  wild and untameable beauty. So
>> first they couple and then  have to live with all of it  and continue to
>> live with the self. The inequality,  the difference first supplies a
>> powerful attractive charge, but the shock of that pleasure is not a
>> practical bond, is not love.
>>
>> I agree that the evil we engage in is unprecedented, nothing is ever the
>> same as it was before, but Arendt also looks for and describes with powerful
>> insight the recognizable patterns and qualities of political movements
>> aspiring to and achieving totalitarian control. She particularly grapples
>> with  the way violence becomes the pervasive characteristic of  social
>> control, a habit of thought,commerce, duty,entertainment political and
>> personal speech. It becomes pervasive but also a numbingly distant,
>> disturbing but also reassuring. She also focuses on the way racism or other
>> expressions of scapegoating saturate people until they cannot see the
>> humanity of the victims.  These are also  themes Pynchon frequents.
>>
>>
>> What I have written  are riffs on  commonly available material and I don't
>> claim these riffs line up with P's intentions but I think it unlikely that
>> he has never considered the life and thought of Hanna Arendt or her affair
>> with Heideggar.
>>
>>
>>
>> Mark I don't really get what you are saying and especially I don't get  the
>> following sentence:
>> Hannah kept fucking fascists....after the war.....see Charisma, that
>> disease......
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Dec 1, 2013, at 9:52 PM, Fiona Shnapple wrote:
>>
>>> Why is Maxine attracted to Horst? For starters, once you get past the
>>> Nazi Name (BE 114-115), he looks like Sterling Hayden. And, as Maxine
>>> tells us, her career choice and her marriage (and this goes for her
>>> sister too) were steered by her parents and the UWS politics, and the
>>> Easter European nonsense  that they were indoctrinated with from
>>> childhood.
>>>
>>>
>>> So, Horst likes to party, Even after he's married with kids. That's
>>> adventure.
>>>
>>> But not for Maxine.
>>>
>>> The the adventure part is mapped on from Hayden to Maxine & Horst
>>> through her marriage to a Lutheran who doubles as Hayden the Hollywood
>>> Lefty and war hero.
>>>
>>> Hayden is 6'5",  is a big beautiful man who loves adventure and has a
>>> problem with Raygun.
>>>
>>>
>>> The Totalitarianism as Fascist Corporate State is so obvious,  it
>>> seems a given. But it's not corporate fascism, as March would argue,
>>> but a madness that has no precedent, as Arendt remind us, the evil we
>>> engage in, is often unprecedented, and looking for a precedent causes
>>> blind spots, giving space to the banal evil of ordinary men and women,
>>> and the madness of the mob.
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Hayden
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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