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

[Fiona Shnapple]

http://themodernword.com/pynchon/paper_gibbs.html

On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 8:22 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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