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

[David Morris]

Human twins are a bit scary.  Magic incarnate.  Duality or polarity? Or
both?  But that is about living twins.

Twin columns are female because of the space between them.  The Greeks knew
this in making their temples: odd or even number of front columns. Male or
female.

A duality is unstable.  It is spinning about itself. It seeks a third for
stability.  A third part resembles unity, a stable oneness. A kind of
center is achieved.

Twins are evil and good.  Unstable.  They are images that are unreliable,
flip-able as coins. Which one is true, trustworthy, good?

The power of paired columns is the void they define.  A very female and
dark power.

David Morris

On Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 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-he-
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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