911 Prewarning

[jochen stremmel]

Just read the paragraph anew, p. 108f, and it was like a revelation:
"for Commerce without Slavery is unthinkable, whilst Slavery must ever
include, as an essential term, the Gallows" and then: "Slavery without
the Gallows being as hollow and Waste a Proceeding, as a Crusade
without the Cross." Poplar trees coming to mind.

But please tell me, Bandwraith, when did you draw the connection? Did
you read M&D after 9/11 - or did you think, reading it before, that
the gallows were a proper simile for the WTC, foreshadowed by Pynchon
with his reference to St. Paul's?

Congratulations,

Jochen

2013/3/1 Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>:
> Terrif mini-essay especially against thos stupid wiki posts. Or, especially
> NOT..
> In itself as you have written it.......
>
> towers matter in TRP.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Feb 28, 2013, at 10:14 PM, bandwraith at aol.com wrote:
>
> 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... (...)
>