The ugly truth of science

[David Morris]

Don't read it.  Watch it on HBO.

On Wednesday, June 19, 2013, Bekah wrote:

> Too funny,  Laura!   Go for it!  (Should I read Game of Thrones?)
>
> Bekah
>
> On Jun 19, 2013, at 8:46 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
>
> > I have to respectfully disagree, Mark. Pynchon wrote COL49  on the
> tail-end of his NY Beatnik phase. He may have (or did) talk to people who
> knew that ARPANET was just a matter of time, but Pynchon couldn't have
> possibly imagined the cultural impact of the internet (significantly
> written in lowercase). W.A.S.T.E. in COL49 had more of a hip vibe, a cool
> conceit (Kool Konceit?) that described an underculture (such as in Orwell's
> 1984) rather than a rebellion. But hypothetically written now, one could
> take the same story (in fact, it's been my fantasy to write a re-conceived
> screenplay of COL49), place it in the present day, and W.A.S.T.E. [the
> clandestine passing of  paper (burnable, leaving no record) notes] would
> become the legitimate response to the NSA's surveillance of all that's
> virtual. Imagine strangers passing amongst themselves notes that said
> simply: Fuck off, NSA. Basically, I think COL49 is a book that demands to
> be written now. Oh, and Marx, try Game of Thrones.
> >
> > Laura
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Markekohut
> >
> >
> > Great post, Kai and I'll give my answer to,the CofL49 question. NO. In
> thunder. perhaps only Bleeding Edge could have been he predicts playfully.
> >
> >
> > On Jun 19, 2013, at 6:38 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> With quoting this sentence from Marx, which I recently read in a diary
> of Ernst Jünger, I implied the suggestion to focus - at this point of the
> debate - on science & technology in literature. Your question, in this
> regard not untypical for certain tendencies of the discussion, appears to
> me unhistorical and, thus, pretty hard to discuss. Marx' question, in
> contrast to this, is a concrete one. But it's not as simple as your answer
> to it does suggest. It's not about being in favor or against technology
> from a romantic point of view. As you know, Marx considered the optimal
> development of "the means of production", and this contains not only
> technology yet also theoretical science, as a necessary condition for
> communist society. And so he was never a Luddite but - in this a typical
> child of the 19th century - an admirer of science and its liberating
> potential. The question of Marx cannot even been answered with a simple
> "No!" While there is great fictional war literature written by
> contemporaries living with about the same technology as the warriors they
> write about - take Grimmelshausen's Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus
> Teutsch (a picaro novel, dt. Schelmenroman, about the Thirty Years' War,
> published in 1668), or Mailer's The Naked and the Dead -  it is, for a
> great writer, absolutely possible to reconstruct the wars and the violence
> of former times. Cormac McCarthy, although living with TV and the Bomb, was
> able to picture the violence of a former century vividly in his novel Blood
> Meridian. So I guess it's not impossible that an author, playing in the
> league of Homer, could succeed in creating something like the Iliad while
> already living in a world that knows gunpowder. The question of Marx asks
> how new technology changes our perception in general and the writer's
> imagination in particular (this is, btw, exactly the approach Kittler
> applied to Pynchon's work); it also hints at the rationalization of war
> which makes archaic rage, so central to the Iliad, look more and more
> old-fashioned. (The counter-position is marked by James Hillman who, in his
> last book A Terrible Love of War, says that it's one and the same archetype
> triggered again and again, no matter whether we talk about the Trojan War
> or US-interventions in Iraq.) With view on Pynchon you may also ask: Could
> The Crying of Lot 49 have been written in a world that already knew the
> Internet?
> >>
> >>
> >> On 18.06.2013 18:25, Monte Davis wrote:
> >>> Nor were armored knights amused by the longbow, or for that matter by
> peasants trained to hold a line of pikes.
> >>>
> >>> From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen [mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de]
> >>> Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 12:15 PM
> >>> To: Monte Davis; pynchon-l at waste.org
> >>> Subject: Re: The ugly truth of science
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> "Could Homer's Iliad have been written in a world that already knew
> gunpowder?"
> >>>
> >>> Karl Marx
> >>>
> >>> >>… or “Would Power and Wealth and Preterition Have Played Nicely if
> They Hadn’t Had Pointy Sticks, Metal, Gunpowder, Cal
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