911 Prewarning

[Tom Beshear]

Thank you, sir. These are perhaps the wisest words I've read about 9/11 -- close to, anyway: "Al Queda was well aware of the location of our "crotch" and it took them two kicks, but they finally caught us right in the balls. If there was a conspiracy it was between those flea bitten fanatic scumbags and our own stupidity."
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: bandwraith at aol.com 
  To: pynchon-l at waste.org 
  Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 10:14 PM
  Subject: Re: 911 Prewarning


  I witnessed the towers just after the first plane hit. All the conspiracy theories are rubbish- mostly because they detract from the real issue, the symbolic power of their destruction. Al Queda was hip to this as early as 1993- when the morons tried to bring one of them down with a garage bomb planted in a rented vehicle, after which they then tried to recoup the deposit on! The only people stupider than Al Queda were the various security agencies charged with protecting us from them.

  Pynchon's most specific reference to the symbolic power of the World Trade Center occurs in Chapter 11 (as a self-signifier of moral bankruptcy) of M&D- the twin gallows, shimmering on the horizon of St. Helena, the two terms- capitalism and slavery- so essential for the western enterprise. Reading it post-911 is enough to cause goose bumps- prescient. And don't forget that steady wind blowing in (back) from the coast.  So stop changing the subject. Al Queda was well aware of the location of our "crotch" and it took them two kicks, but they finally caught us right in the balls. If there was a conspiracy it was between those flea bitten fanatic scumbags and our own stupidity.

  Since 911, any critique of the capitalist enterprise has been forced to walk gingerly around the issue of sympathy for the devil. But coincidence works in strange ways, and the demonic, despite its rabid hatred, is sometimes twisted into the agency of The Good- much to its own chargrin.


   


  -----Original Message-----
  From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
  To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
  Sent: Thu, Feb 28, 2013 8:34 pm
  Subject: Re: 911 Prewarning



  How about discussing the issue in relation to Pynchon's work?

  Not that he knows the answers re 9/11, but neither do we, so ... 
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Against_the_Day_and_September_11

  9/11 in Against the Day 
  On roughly pages 138-155 of Against the Day, the Lovecraftian narrative about a mysterious power dug up from the ice bears numerous parallels to the events of 9/11: 
  Page 145: "even reaching the depot would prove an Odyssey. For the streets were in mad disorder" 
  Page 148: "the bad dream I still try to wake from, the great city brought to sorrow and ruin" 
  Page 151: "they'd been warned, repeatedly, about just such a possiblity. The city more and more vertical, the population growing in density, all hostages to just sich an incursion." 
  Page 151: "a story taken so for granted that its coming true was the last thing anybody expected" 
  Against the Day & the Controlled Demolition Hypothesis
  It has been suggested that the following excerpts might allude to the Controlled demolition hypothesis for the collapse of the WTC: 
  Page 85: "some of these explosions, the more deadly of them, in fact, were really set off to begin with not by Anarchists but by the owners themselves." 
  Page 175: "Only slowly would it occur to his ultra-keen detective's reasoning that these bombs could have been set by anybody, including those who would clearly benefit if "Anarchists", however loosely defined, could be blamed for it." 
  (...)

  9/11 and Pynchon's other works
  Gravity's Rainbow
  The poem/song that appears on the final page of the book contains an image that takes on new meaning post-9/11: 
    There is a Hand to turn the time, 
    Though thy Glass today be run. 
    Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low 
    Find the last poor Pret'rite one... 
    Till the Riders sleep in ev'ry road, 
    All through our crippl'd Zone. 
    With a face on ev'ry mountainside, 
    And a Soul in ev'ry stone... 
  (...)

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