Hannah Maxine Arendt and Martin Horst Windust Heidegger Loeffler

[Fiona Shnapple]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9hTVAjdrbE



On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 6:21 AM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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