Re: BEER ch 88,89—Beyond Good and Evil

[Markekohut]

There was a locally, Tri-state, famous grocer, deli, restaurant in Connecticut ( name like Stinky 's [NOT] or Smiley's or sumpin, which got famously indicted for an elaborate tax-dodging scheme---literally running real,cash register tape into the basement and having a fake tape stay in the registers that got a lot of news coverage when they got busted when I lived there. Reminded. 

We can all riff ( again) on the technology is neutral line. Classic " touching bottom" line in Pynchon. I say he means it sarcastically. It isn't NOW. It isn't in this novel. 

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 20, 2013, at 7:01 AM, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

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