Well, Pynchon seems to have

[alice wellintown]

You have the energy. You don't have the balls.

On Tuesday, June 4, 2013, wrote:

> This is all confused, inconsistent tripe.  And I'm sorry, but I don't have
> the energy to take it apart sentence by stupid sentence.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Mon, Jun 3, 2013 9:57 pm
> Subject: Re: Well, Pynchon seems to have
>
>  Grace is amazement and wonder, not at our transformation of the world,
> but at what we can't explain, understand, or "transform" to our purposes.
> We want to transform the world, to make it ours, to give it names, to make
> it an extension of us. This appeals especially to the little man because
> science makes him physically more powerful; he can build with it; he can
> see with sharper focus, he can think and calculate faster. But it can't
> help him make better moral decisions. This is the lesson that Grover Snodd,
> Pynchon's boy genius who applies mathematics to integration of the races,
> struggles to learn.  A harsher lesson is taught to Kurt Mondaugan who is,
> at the end of his story, listening to a language, a native language, he
> can't comprehend. Mason leans this too when he dreams in native languages
> he neither speaks not has, perhaps, ever heard, if they exist. Science
> improves human life. We believe this. We want to. We need to believe this
> because science is an extension of our purposes and we want our purposes to
> be great. But science can't help us love the earth and our fellow creature,
> our brothers and sisters. Or can it? If it can focus the eye, make it
> sharper, slow things down so that we can get a better view, perhaps we can
> solve or prevent a crime or make a decision based on improved data, a
> decision that is more just, better. Film can be manipulated. The data
> skewed. More data, more film, more science only shakes our confidence in
> common sense and judgment. But what about the liver transplant? Yeah , I
> want one. Who gets one? Who decides?  New science, new moral and ethical
> problems to solve. And science is not much help with this. It often
> compounds, confuses, undermines our instincts, our confidence.
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 9:11 PM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> What the novels argue is that humans are scientific beings, technological
> beings, engineers by nature. Our scientific nature, like our spiritual
> nature, like our aesthetic nature .... is part of everything we do.
> Science  flows from us in all we do, defining the world, transforming it.
> Pynchon was born into what has been called the golden age of engineer, a
> dynamic period that advanced a dynamic view of nature. Nature knows
> transformation, not extinction, and nature is our experience, science, our
> application. We can not, to quote one of those big men of letters,
> distinguish the science from our application of it. A tool, such as a
> hammer, to quote another big man of letters, has our human purpose in it.
> A dynamic world, not a fixed world, is malleable, is not absolute, is our
> experience of it, thus all mystery retreats. Unless we experience what we
> can't explain, cannot analyze. Unless we experience Grace.
>
> On Monday, June 3, 2013, Markekohut wrote:
>
>  We don't disagree, I think.....complex he is fer sure....one reason I do
> read and reread...
>
>  But I did write " some anti-technology and anti-science stuff".......key
> qualifier for me here
> Is " some"......part of that complexity.
>
>  Once again, few of his contemporary writers of fiction, near peers,
> alluded to Ludditism
> Favorably in a non-fiction piece, his own opinion,and I have pointed to
> some perspectives
> On math and science in Against the Day this last still-unfinished read.....
>
>  You're one of the best defenders of science on this list and really
> illumine Parts where P
> Shows his aware-love......
>
>  But the other side exists too, I aver.
>
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Jun 3, 2013, at 5:54 PM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>   He writes better than anyone else about the intersections of science
> and technology with our lowest **and** highest inclinations. If yo
>
>
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