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

[John Bailey]

Damn, that Sloth essay is mandatory re-reading in the reflected light
of BE. Wish I'd gone back to it sooner.

(And just listened to the Slate podcast several have linked to here -
it's worth it! I disagree with much of what's said but it's passionate
and playful and articulates many of the objections to the novel in a
way that I found illuminating, as someone who likes it)

Re: Johnny Mnemonic, I think it was Mr Kohut who noted William
Gibson's Twitter response to hearing about the film's mention (along
the lines of "really?!?")

Is Felix's last name a reference to Oingo Boingo? I only know the band
by name but they're mentioned in the same breath as Spike Jones and
Frank Zappa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oingo_Boingo

Also Boing Boing is a very popular geek culture website that has been
around for ~25 years (began as an offline zine I think). Very pop
technology stuff.

Drawing a line to P's time at Boeing? Maybe too much.

Felix is Latin for happy or lucky. Happy Boeing? Oh. Maybe he is the
ghost of a young P who once thought he could work for a tech company
and pretend that the technology itself was neutral...

Back to that podcast - the speaker who hated the novel states at the
start that she didn't get into BE's overt anti-technology theme, which
left me thinking "what anti-technology theme?" Did anyone else get
that from the novel? P's work doesn't suggest that technology is
neutral, but as the Sloth essay indicates neither is his knee
a-jerking in a particular technology's direction.

On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 12:00 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > Remember all those funky stamps in CoL49? Made me think of tax stamps,
>> > for stock trades. Like all those old "Pynchon & Co." tax stamps.
>
> Here're some (but who's Raymond?)
> http://1898revenues.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-york-stock-brokers-raymond-pynchon.html?m=1
>
>>Internet trades are not taxed per transaction. They really, really should
>> be, you know.
>
> - easy to administer, collect, even if they dampened trading a bit they
> probably could replace all other taxation. Hard to bell that cat, though!
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l