911 Prewarning

[Markekohut]

My towers remark is just about TRP's general modernist/ anthropological use ( ala Frazer) ,
Ya know " the tower is everywhere" line from Lot 49.

I did read M & D after 9/11 and never had a shadow of a perception akin to Bandwaith's. 

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 1, 2013, at 10:24 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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... (...)
>>