GR translation: the hollow of an upended trunk

[alice wellintown]

Right. The bombing of civilians and non-military targets was not based
on a Baedeker Star-System.

But the calculations, on both sides, did involve maps and math, and a
concerted effort to employ the Little Man's Science-technic to destroy
the Spirit, including, of course, the Life of the Trees. The failure
of Slothrop's American Enlightenment, as he is only beginning to
understand as he coils up in an infant's position, suffering from his
arrogance and stupidity, as death (shit) flows from his ass and his
head, though the two are not easily distinguished at this juncture,
is, once again, given another chance to see the Forest for the Trees,
though, ironically the Forest be gone. In the upended Tree, the human
failure to destroy Nature, the Magic that abounds, is, like Pirate's
Bananas, Amazing (grace!), so that "only God can tell the meshes" of
the "science" in the soil, the Chemistry, the Equations.

see  Lines and Crimes of Demarcation: Mathematizing nature in
Heidegger, Pynchon, and Kehlmann
Sean Ireton

Abstract
In his bestselling novel from 2005, Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring
the World), Daniel Kehlmann brings together the explorer Alexander von
Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss in an effort to
show that the scientific progress preached by the Enlightenment is a
double-edged sword. Hence the double entendre of the title: Humboldt's
and Gauss's “surveying” (Vermessung) enterprises typify human
“arrogance” (Vermessenheit) toward nature. The ideas presented in
Kehlmann's book were no doubt influenced by Thomas Pynchon's Mason &
Dixon (1997), a metafictional history in which the Mason and Dixon
survey is represented as a rationalist endeavor that transforms the
primitive American landscape into an organized grid of human control.
Both authors are critiquing, from a postmodern vantage,
eighteenth-century instrumental reason, which manifests itself in the
urge to measure, chart, and demarcate the world. At various points in
his narrative, Pynchon sums up this basic anthropocentric view as
mathesis, a term that recalls the early modern scientific project of
mathesis universalis or the attempt to “mathematize” nature. According
to Heidegger, mathesis, which sums up our modern technological
attitude toward the world, developed as a result of Galilean geometry,
Newtonian science, and Cartesian philosophy, all of which
conceptualize reality according to purely speculative mathematical
laws. This article brings Heidegger, Pynchon, and Kehlmann into
dialogue with one another in an effort to show how they each critique,
in remarkably similar fashion, the conceptual as well as physical
lines of demarcation that mathesis inflicts upon the world.




On 7/7/13, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>  >
> http://easylifehacks.blogspot.com/2013/05/history-of-supernatural-destruction.html
>
> "In retaliation for the March 1942 attack of the Royal Air Force (RAF)
> on Lübeck, a German city of little strategic importance, Germany
> unleashed a series of aerial raids on unfortified towns in England.
> General Gustav von Sturm, an influential Nazi propagandist, selected the
> targets by following Baedeker’s three-star system, first developed in
> 1844 to identify the tourist sites that hurried travelers could not miss."
>
> The so-called Baedeker Blitz is a myth;  there is bzw was no "three-star
> system" in the Baedeker, and none of the cities bombed was among those
> the latest published edition from 1937 gave two stars to.
>
> "Dies ist jedoch in Zweifel zu ziehen und kann so schon deshalb nicht
> stimmen, da die Vergabe von drei Sternen in Baedekern gar nicht
> vorkommt, so auch nicht bei der 1937 erschienenen letzten Auflage des
> Reisehandbuchs für Großbritannien vor 1945. Touristisch und künstlerisch
> wichtige Sehenswürdigkeiten konnten einen Stern erhalten. Zwei Sterne
> wurden nur für wenige, herausragende Besuchsziele vergeben; Exeter, Bath
> und Norwich gehörten jedoch ebenso wenig in diese Kategorie wie Bury St.
> Edmunds <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bury_St._Edmunds>, Great Yarmouth
> <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Yarmouth> und Ipswich
> <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipswich>."
>
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baedeker_Blitz
>
>