Hannah Maxine Arendt and Martin Horst Windust Heidegger Loeffler

[John Bailey]

I am a complete novice in this area. What's the difference between the
pits and the stockmarket? The pits traded stocks, right? I don't mean
to emphasise the stockyard comparison which is entirely mine. But the
pits (RIP) traded commodities on the stockmarket, didn't they?

Asking in all honesty/naivete.

On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 10:31 PM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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