BEER ch 88,89—Beyond Good and Evil

[Robin Landseadel]

Meanwhile, back in the book, the set up, the scam—zappers, a sneaky  
little way low-rent way of tapping the till, preventing sales from  
registering in the register, enabling the perpetuator to skim off the  
difference.  Phipps, aka "VIP" Epperdew is the perp. Maxine is in  
Montreal, added to the New York City budget line on the QT "as  
always". Maxine's magic bladder sends her signals leading her to the  
"Mile's End"  bar's loo where the stall's walls provide the phone # of  
one Felix Boïngueaux—"for whom Vip's name didn't just ring a bell but  
threatened to kick the door in" over late payment issues. Golly gee!  
Another of them "Chance" meetings! Happenstance? The magic pull of New  
Yawk's sewers? The author just riding roughshod over the narrative  
conventions of noir? Variations on the Magical Realist Tango? Old man  
shouting at cloud?

They meet at an internet enabled laundromat called NetNet:

Felix: "So you and Mr. Epperdew, you're colleagues?"

"Neighbors, actually in Westchester."° Pretending to be another bent  
businessperson interested in the "hidden delete options" for her point- 
of-sale network, only out of technical curiosity, of course.

"I might be down your way soon, looking for financing."

"I think in the States there might be a legal problem?"

"No, actually it'd be for starting up a PCM project."

"Some, ah, recreational drug?"

"Phantomware countermeasures."

"Wait, you're supposed to be pro-phantomware, what's with this  
'counter'?

"We build it, we disable it. You're frowning. We're beyond good and  
evil here, the technology, it's neutral, eh?"


Maxine's tango with Felix goes a little like this, they convene at  
Felix's basement pad—did I mention that Felix looked almost old enough  
to drive? Felix orders in Montreal pizza with little known forms of  
sausage, they smoke weed and watch "Johnny Mnemonic (1995)"*. No hanky  
panky, apparently, but Maxine leaves with a massive data dump on "VIP."


And so ends our morning reading on the Paranoid Radio Network. If any  
of you have brought the items I mentioned last week then we can all  
turn to "Deadly Sins," page 22:

Is Sloth once more about to be, somehow, transcended? Another  
possibility of course is that we have not passed beyond acedia at all,  
but that it has only retreated from its long-familiar venue,  
television, and is seeking other, more shadowy environments -- who  
knows? computer games, cult religions, obscure trading floors in  
faraway cities -- ready to pop up again in some new form to offer us  
cosmic despair on the cheap.

Unless the state of our souls becomes once more a subject of serious  
concern, there is little question that Sloth will continue to evolve  
away from its origins in the long-ago age of faith and miracle, when  
daily life really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work and time was a  
story, with a beginning, middle and end. Belief was intense,  
engagement deep and fatal. The Christian God was near. Felt. Sloth --  
defiant sorrow in the face of God's good intentions -- was a deadly sin.

Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now seems  
increasingly to define us -- technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow,  
despite technology's good intentions, there we'll sit with our heads  
in virtual reality, glumly refusing to be absorbed in its idle,  
disposable fantasies, even those about superheroes of Sloth back in  
Sloth's good old days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with  
the ruthless villains of the Acedia Squad.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-sloth.html

How those two got connected in my mind, how should I know? But on  
these pages where Maxine's in the upper provinces we see a whole lot  
of things develop very quickly. Again, with Maxine's bladder, again  
with "The real players in High Tech right now are still in middle  
school" and again we see a lack of concern for the consequences of  
their actions by the players of the game['s]."We're beyond good and  
evil here". That line, with it's allusion to Friedrich Nietzche also  
made me think of the financial collapse of the housing market and the  
rise of the .01%, something that happened in large part due to the  
sort of high-speed internet trading that's "Beyond Good and Evil",  
it's just technology, you know.

Remember all those funky stamps in CoL49? Made me think of tax stamps,  
for stock trades. Like all those old "Pynchon & Co." tax stamps.  
Internet trades are not taxed per transaction. They really, really  
should be, you know.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm

°Must be something special about Westchester

*A tip of the Hatlo Hat to William Gibson?


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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l