Bleeding Edge: "The Trade Center towers were religious too" (p. 338)

Rich richard.romeo at gmail.com
Tue Nov 19 16:42:14 CST 2013 

Doubt anyone would claim religiosity if they worked in the damn buildings. I found it a most depressing experience. People think the place was filled with high finance people; it wasn't. 
And let's not forget the mini mall on the concourse some of whose steps survived the day. 

rich


> On Nov 19, 2013, at 4:08 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> 
> Homoerotic phalli, I still maintain. Replaced with a good ol' hetero one now.
> 
> Laura
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi>
>> Sent: Nov 19, 2013 3:33 PM
>> To: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>> Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Subject: Re: Bleeding Edge: "The Trade Center towers were religious too"    (p. 338)
>> 
>> 
>> Thanks for the well-deserved lesson David.
>> 
>> Still, regardless of how they stood in relation to each other and  
>> their surroundings, I'm inclined to think that the twinness of the WTC  
>> buildings had something to do with their symbolic power. But I clearly  
>> will have to come up with something better.
>> 
>> 
>> Heikki
>> 
>> David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>:
>> 
>>> So many things in this brief analysis of WTC towers is incorrect and
>>> exposing his ignorance of architecture:
>>> 
>>> 1.  The towers didn't turn their backs on anything.  They had no backs. All
>>> their faces were identical.  And they were no more faceless than any other
>>> of their contemporaries.  Most modernist towers of that era and before were
>>> grids, by nature uniform and and faceless.
>>> 
>>> 2. Neither did they face each other.  They were offset from each other on a
>>> diagonal.  Thus they maximized the number of faces sent outward, not at
>>> each other.  In other words they didn't block each other's views.
>>> 
>>> 3.  He is correct to point out that they did all they could to stand out
>>> and dominate.  That is one of the central features of early and later
>>> (pre-Pomo) modernist architecture, which was notoriously anti-urban and
>>> ant-street.  Modernism hated facades lining streets or plazas or squares,
>>> all the devices of pre-modern architecture to define urban SPACE.  Pre
>>> modern urban architecture worked in a collective manner to define public
>>> spaces.  Modern architecture hated urbanism, seeking to demolish vast areas
>>> of urban fabric in order to provide an open limitless field in which to
>>> display mega objects.  The WTC did its best to do just that in lower
>>> Manhattan.  This is just plain vanilla modern architecture at a scale that
>>> allowed it to achieve standard modernist goals.
>>> 
>>> BTW, most architects thought they were crappy architecture.
>>> 
>>> David Morris
>>> 
>>>> On Monday, November 18, 2013, Heikki Raudaskoski wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> I never appreciated Baudrillard much to begin with, and his writings on
>>>> 9/11 made me appreciate him less, but some parts of his analysis may hold
>>>> true, like the following points paraphrased by Margaret McNally:
>>>> 
>>>> "The aesthetic twinness and symmetry of the Twin Towers, and their
>>>> dominant height above other skyscrapers in the New York City skyline,
>>>> signified that the WTC no longer represented competition of corporate
>>>> capital among these modern symbols of capitalism in New York City or,
>>>> indeed, the world. Rather, it represented western global capital
>>>> dominance (Baudrillard, Spirit 38-39). The Towers' faceless facades stood
>>>> isolated, turning their back on other skyscrapers, and facing one another
>>>> in a playful, yet somewhat arrogant gesture that both defied modernism,
>>>> and signified their self-contained supremacy of global power (40)."
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> http://tinyurl.com/p9hghuz (Please note that clicking this link will
>>>> prompt a download of a Word document to your computer.)
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Heikki
>>>> 
>>>>> On Mon, 18 Nov 2013, Paul Mackin wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Also, it's the media--TV, radio, and print--that creates that "instant
>>>>> history," telling us what we now think even before we think it, or
>>>>> might never have thought it. It sells newspapers, as the saying goes.
>>>>> 
>>>>> In a similar case, there's a story-heading this morning in either the
>>>>> Times or the Post that reads "America still haunted by JFK
>>>>> assassination."  Well, speaking for myself, the things haunting me
>>>>> have nothing to do with that 50 year ago sad event.  I suspect it's
>>>>> the same for many of the rest of you as well.
>>>>> 
>>>>> P
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> I agree with both of you. As a matter of prosaic fact, most of the
>>>> corporate
>>>>>> tenants of the WTC were insurance companies (the largest by square
>>>> footage a
>>>>>> Blue Cross HMO) and a slew of import/export firms and financial
>>>>>> intermediaries few of us had ever heard of. They were landmarks and
>>>>>> sightseeing attractions, but certainly hadn't replaced the literal or
>>>>>> synecdochal Wall Street, or the Chase Manhattan or Citibank towers, or
>>>> the
>>>>>> Federal Reserve bank, as first-to-mind symbols of finance or US
>>>> economic
>>>>>> hegemony.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> UNTIL the week after September 11, 2001. It was the spectacle of their
>>>>>> destruction, *in combination* with the attack on the Pentagon and the
>>>>>> aborted attack on the White House (both unquestionably first-to-mind
>>>> symbols
>>>>>> in their own domains), that retroactively made them "the symbolic
>>>> center of
>>>>>> Western capitalism."
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> IOW: if our enemies had chosen them (twice!) as symbolic targets, by
>>>> god
>>>>>> they'd better have been important symbols. FWIW, I think the hasty
>>>> neatness
>>>>>> of that "instant history" in the wake of the attack is a significant
>>>> source
>>>>>> of TRP's animus that's been discussed in another thread.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 11:37 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
>>>>>> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I agree with you.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> But as representative building - and here the W in WTC is of
>>>> relevance -
>>>>>>> the Twin Towers were  functioning as the master icon of Western
>>>> capitalism.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> On 18.11.2013 16:49, Paul Mackin wrote:
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> I always thought 11 Wall street (NYSE) was the symbolic and religious
>>>>>>>> center of American (Western) capitalism,  with its opening and
>>>> closing
>>>>>>>> (church) bells ringing away.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> P
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 7:14 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
>>>>>>>> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> Shawn, as a fake Zen therapist, might not be the novel's most
>>>>>>>>> trustworthy
>>>>>>>>> voice, but here he is on to something. Discussions about the
>>>> symbolic
>>>>>>>>> dimension of the Twin Towers tend, also on this list, to reduce it
>>>> to
>>>>>>>>> its
>>>>>>>>> phallic element. This is there, no doubt, but if this was all there
>>>> is,
>>>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>>>> could have been just any skyscraper. Yet the Trade Center Towers
>>>> were
>>>>>>>>> not
>>>>>>>>> just any skyscraper. Artists like Philippe Petit or Wim Wenders
>>>> ("Der
>>>>>>>>> Amerikanische Freund", 1977) realized this right away. The Twin
>>>> Towers
>>>>>>>>> were
>>>>>>>>> the symbolic center of Western capitalism. And when they were
>>>> destroyed,
>>>>>>>>> Western people in general and US people in particular perceived
>>>> this as
>>>>>>>>> an
>>>>>>>>> attack on "our way of life", as chancellor Schröder put it back
>>>> then.
>>>>>>>>> Shawn's comparison of the WTC attacks to the blowing up of the
>>>> Buddha
>>>>>>>>> statues in Afghanistan makes this symbolic dimension clear.
>>>>>>>>> The shock and the confusion afterwards (including the belittling of
>>>> the
>>>>>>>>> terrorists' courage) have to do with the -
>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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