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

[Markekohut]

" The tower is everywhere" from Lot49, I quote. Tower as spiritual/ religious embodiment in modernity, majorly explored in The Golden Bough and taken over by modernist writers must be thought of here, I say. 

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 19, 2013, at 11:10 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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