Pynchon & Politics( Lacey essay)

[Paul Mackin]

On 1/31/2013 8:12 AM, Markekohut wrote:
> Misc. on Lacey essay. His words on Slothrop becoming " invisible" .
>
> I ran across this tidbit on Richard Burton in Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold movie.
> The Director wanted his character to be " anonymous" in the film. At one with the background, the atmosphere so to speak. ...Le Carre's long-suffering Smiley, another reason besides the
> Espionage, betrayal and double-agenting themes of Le Carre that P might resonantly like his work?
>
> ( Burton feared--how do you act No Self? --and  chafed under the Director's desires but turned in a masterful performance all agree)


It's pretty hard to remain anonymous working at such a glamorous 
occupation as espionage or acting.  Every bit as hard as it is to remain 
out of the limelight for a genius novelist, as our Tom Pynchon knows 
well although do pretty well at it.  By now it's all so much a big 
spectator sport.

It's only human for spies to want their exploits known.  I just read a 
NY Times magazine essay on the French pulp novelist Gerard de Villiar,  
to whom, apparently, the espionage world feeds the very most up to date 
material, so as to make his otherwise cliche ridden thrillers required 
reading for the French elite.

It's that kind of world, and I love living in it.

P


>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Jan 31, 2013, at 7:32 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> On 1/31/2013 4:28 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>> We are speaking of Peirce and Pragmatism.
>>> from Wiki,
>>>
>>> Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere
>>> verbal or hyperbolic doubt
>>
>> Rules out Descartes.
>>
>> P
>>
>>> ,[10] and said, in order to understand a
>>> conception in a fruitful way, "Consider the practical effects of the
>>> objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is
>>> the whole of your conception of the object",[11] which he later called
>>> the pragmatic maxim. It equates any conception of an object to a
>>> conception of that object's effects to a general extent of the
>>> effects' conceivable implications for informed practice. It is the
>>> heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental
>>> reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable
>>> confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances — a method hospitable
>>> to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the
>>> employment and improvement of verification. Typical of Peirce is his
>>> concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual
>>> foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and
>>> inductivist empiricism, although he was a mathematical logician and a
>>> founder of statistics.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Scientists are free to use whatever resources they have — their own
>>> creativity, ideas from other fields, induction, Bayesian inference,
>>> and so on — to imagine possible explanations for a phenomenon under
>>> study. Charles Sanders Peirce, borrowing a page from   **Aristotle
>>> (Prior Analytics, 2.25)**   described the incipient stages of inquiry,
>>> instigated by the "irritation of doubt" to venture a plausible guess,
>>> as abductive reasoning. The history of science is filled with stories
>>> of scientists claiming a "flash of inspiration", or a hunch, which
>>> then motivated them to look for evidence to support or refute their
>>> idea. Michael Polanyi made such creativity the centerpiece of his
>>> discussion of methodology.
>>>
>>> William Glen observes that
>>>
>>> the success of a hypothesis, or its service to science, lies not
>>> simply in its perceived "truth", or power to displace, subsume or
>>> reduce a predecessor idea, but perhaps more in its ability to
>>> stimulate the research that will illuminate … bald suppositions and
>>> areas of vagueness.[56]
>>>
>>> In general scientists tend to look for theories that are "elegant" or
>>> "beautiful". In contrast to the usual English use of these terms, they
>>> here refer to a theory in accordance with the known facts, which is
>>> nevertheless relatively simple and easy to handle. Occam's Razor
>>> serves as a rule of thumb for choosing the most desirable amongst a
>>> group of equally explanatory hypotheses.
>>>
>>> --------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 1/30/13, Bled Welder <bledwelder at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Al: Not AI, get your head out of the gutter:
>>>>
>>>> "Just because a person uses logic, or computation, or even if she works to
>>>> revolutionize logic, does not mean that her method is logistic."
>>>>
>>>> You can say that only because "logistic" is a word that that's not actually
>>>> a word.  It could possibly benefit from an 's' or on 'al' tacked to it's,
>>>> very square, hind-end.
>>>>
>>>> Anyway the whole statement is absurd.  Imagine some poor sap, oh say Lord
>>>> Russell, who works to revolutionize the whole industry of logic without
>>>> ever once being the least bit logical about the whole business.
>>>>
>>>> I think form his Analysis of Mind, something around page 467ish:
>>>> "That which has hitherto been called, 'logical', is really it's opposite:
>>>> not logical, or as we like to call it down at The Lords' Pub, it is absurd.
>>>>   In other
>>>> words, that which is absurd, is logical, and that which is logical, is
>>>> absurd.  Which is logical by virtue of its being, well, absurd.  Cheers."
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 5:58 PM, alice wellintown
>>>> <alicewellintown at gmail.com
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> Pierce is very logistic. That is the nature of his " analysis". He
>>>>> revolutionized Logic.
>>>>>
>>>>> OK. But I stick to what I wrote. It's a matter of terms. Just because
>>>>> a person uses logic, or computation, or even if she works to
>>>>> revolutionize logic, does not mean that her method is logistic.
>>>>> Descartes' method is logistic. He, like Peirce wrote about his search
>>>>> for and use of his method. Peirce, pardon the pun, doubted Descartes
>>>>> doubting, and this because he disentangled it, he used his method, not
>>>>> computation or logic, but analytic.