Lacey: old and new questions.

[alice wellintown]

Some on Ahab and Pointsman & Blicero. Slothrop, Mexico as Ishmaels.

http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/engl52b/gr1-2.html

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-rainbow.html

http://open.salon.com/blog/cosmoetica/2012/08/21/book_review_of_gravitys_rainbow_by_thomas_pynchon


On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 5:41 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ia gree that since both are partly right we need to look elsewhere for
> P's norms or the norms of the novel, that is, to determine who it is
> the novel favor and why.
>
> This isn't hard to do because the novel makes it difficult to side
> with Pointsman. Statistics have their limitations and blind spots, but
> Mexico is not so bad. Pointsman is as a guy we can't like.
>
> There are, as you say, dozens of other complications, still, it is
> Mexico who is favored and Pointsman who is not. We needn't think to
> deeply about this to see what P has done; he has done what novelist
> before him have. In fact, in several reviews of the novel Pointsman is
> compared with Ahab while Mexison is compared with Ishmael.
>
>> The problem of choosing among hypotheses comes up in the dialogue between
>> Pointsman and Mexico over the predictability of the rockets.  Beside these 2
>> main competing hypotheses, there are further complications- what to do with
>> information from ghosts of the White visitation, and what about the long
>> term ethical implications of rocket delivered weapons. But in the argument
>> between Pointsman and Mexico both are partly right , the rockets  go where
>> you Point.. them  but the exact point of impact and  general distribution
>> is a function of probability and randomness.   How and why bombs in rocket
>> are used gets dicier. and in the novel are  a function of planetary
>> hard-ons, blowback,  religious fantasies, capital investments. These
>> factors, taken together with all the other millions of factors  make
>> predictability, guidance, and probability  seem inadequate to the dangers we
>> talking monkeys are facing with our current array of thermonuclear devices,
>> space based weapons, drones, rockets, and flouridated water and the novel
>> clearly addresses the danger.