Well, Pynchon seems to have

[Paul Mackin]

On 6/4/2013 11:29 PM, David Morris wrote:
> This is in the spirit of the P-list daze of Yore.


Do you yearn for those daze too?

P


>
> On Tuesday, June 4, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>     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
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130605/5d21490d/attachment.html>