Thomas Pynchon Returns to New York, Where He's Always Been

[alice wellintown]

Right. But whoar ehte fuckers in your post on science?

You're going to avoid that question like a mug.

In any event, Pynchon is an author. In one of his more revealing
essays he identifies with Melville's Bartleby. Melville and Bartleby
were New Yorkers too. In that tale, the fuckers are, at the very top,
John Jacob Astor, but also include the Lawyer Narrator, and Bartleby's
co-workers, and indeed, all the poeple he encounters. They all fail to
save him. No One was saved...all the lonely people, can live in NYC or
out where Hector and Zoyd have their romance.

As an author in our century who knows a bit about science and
technology, who is and has been since young, attracted to luddite
romance and science fiction,  it makes sense that P would, as he
delves into human experiences, the father quest, revenge, the mother
quest, conspiracy...satirize science and technology. And so he does.
He does this from the start, with "Entropy" and with "The Secret
Integration", and, although I amuch in agreement with Hefferan (read
it to get the joak), and with J Kerry Grant, whose wonderful
Introduction to _A Companion to V._ reminds us that when we read P, if
we read him with open eyes, approaching his workd from conservative,
what McHale calls Modernist, expectations, and so, we are playing the
game, the Henry Adams, the Stencil, the Oedipa, the Prairie, the
Slothrop, the Robert Graves....looking for, searching for,
connections, paranoid page over paranoid page palimpsested quest after
pailimpsested quest, as what we search for is cast in lots crying in
the wilderness waiting for Godot, waiting for, reading for the end of
the text, the end of the quest, but the river ...runs...back...to
Eden...through the birth cord, to Eve, to V., to me, gazing like a
monk in the navel of an orange clockwork universe.

Today, despit the fact that the vast majority of humans still organize
their view of the world with religion, the priest is not worthy of
serious satire. Pynchon's satires include priests, of course, some of
them are men of science. This is important. But a good satire of the
priest is the work of Chaucer, not Pynchon. A good cartoon in the
papers will get a good giggle, and even a death threat from the
Iranians, but today, it is the scientist, the technocrat who has taken
the role of priest in the west, so, the german sickness, as P calls
it, a sickness of our century, is spread by the high priests and low
priests of science.

In Chaucer's day, when a priest was whipped for touching the boys, his
sacred garments were taken, his vestments stripped. By this, the
sacred, and the dignity of his profession, of his calling, of his
order, was preserved, protected, secured. If a Chaucer, or cartoonist
of the day salndered the man of the cloth, his recourse was in the
law. The poet could defend himself by arguing that his works are
satires. His target, not a man, but the priesthood. This claim might
further his troubles, as an offense taken by an entire order, or
worse, a powerful profession, might have him whipped and in prison
before he could scream "irony!"

But when a man, take Snowden if you must, is guilty of treason (not
saying he is, just using an example to spin another flaming thread
here), does this defame all spies? All us ordinary men?

Satire may be a private affair. Nixon, or his estate, may take offense
from GR. I guess. Of course P is protected by law. But here, the
defense of science is wrongheaded because it is private. Monte and
others complain that I have strapped them to drones or some such. What
utter nonsese is this? And far worse is the defense of the order, that
is, of the profession of scince and technology, and it fallacious
claims that only the order of scientists is fit and able to judge its
own. We poor preterit lack the knowledge of the latest theory and
therefore are unqualified to critique it. Talk about muddled reason.
How can we know if they are impartial judges or if they are merely
protecting themselves and thier unbridled esoteric powers.

There are no experts in sciecne on this list.  Oh sure, some of us
know enough to teach Physics and Calculus. Been there done that. But
the science expert I'm talking about has no time for Pynchon-L. Has no
time to teach old basic stuff, the kind of stuff Pynchon, and other
non-experts use in their fictions.

Cheers,

T & A   (That's tits and ass to you old man)