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

[Robin Landseadel]

" . . . How few are the unmediated interchanges, how rare the direct  
contacts, or even voice contacts, what a mess of procedure is now  
installed between the self and most anything. Not that we are always  
overtly aware of this. We adapt our expectations almost automatically.  
We no longer dial a phone expecting to be greeted by a human voice; we  
assume we will pay for this or that by inserting a ticket and credit  
card; we fill in the appointed fields with numbers and codes. I’ll  
even allow that there could be a human compensation for this, that so  
much abstraction and removal in the daily round might whet our  
appetites for the interchanges that really matter, and that we come  
together with our family and friends with fresher impulse and sharper  
need. I don’t know. . . "

" . . . Finally one day he noticed a front page story in the Times,  
complete with AP wirephoto, about a Buddhist monk in Viet Nam who had  
set himself on fire to protest government policies. "Groovy!" cried  
the executive. He went to the garage, siphoned all the gasoline from  
his Buick's tank, put on his green Zachary All suit with the vest,  
stuffed all his letters from unsuccessful suicides into a coat pocket,  
went in the kitchen, sat on the floor, proceeded to douse himself good  
with the gasoline. He was about to make the farewell flick of the  
wheel on his faithful Zippo, which had seen him through the Normany  
hedgerows, the Ardennes, Germany, and postwar America, when he heard a  
key in the front door, and voices. It was his wife and some man, whom  
he soon recognized as the very efficiency expert at Yoyodyne who had  
caused him to be replaced by an IBM 7094. Intrigued by the irony of  
it, he sat in the kitchen and listened, leaving his necktie dipped in  
the gasoline as a sort of wick. From what he could gather, the  
efficiency expert wished to have sexual intercourse with the wife on  
the Moroccan rug in the living room. The wife was not unwilling. The  
executive heard lewd laughter, zippers, the thump of shoes, heavy  
breathing, moans. He took his tie out of the gasoline and started to  
snigger. He closed the top on his Zippo. "I hear laughing,"his wife  
said presently. "I smell gasoline," said the efficiency expert. Hand  
in hand, naked, the two proceeded to the kitchen. "I was about to do  
the Buddhist monk thing," explained the executive. "Nearly three weeks  
it takes him,"marvelled the efficiency expert, "to decide. You know  
how long it would've taken the IBM 7094? Twelve microseconds. No  
wonder you were replaced." The executive threw back his head and  
laughed for a solid ten minutes, along toward the middle of which his  
wife and her friend, alarmed, retired, got dressed and went out  
looking for the police. The executive undressed, showered and hung his  
suit out on the line to dry. Then he noticed a curious thing. The  
stamps on some of the letters in his suit pocket had turned almost  
white. He realized that the gasoline must have dissolved the printing  
ink. Idly, he peeled off a stamp and saw suddenly the image of the  
muted post horn, the skin of his hand showing clearly through the  
watermark. "A sign," he whispered, "is what it is." If he'd been a  
religious man he would have fallen to his knees. As it was, he only  
declared, with great solemnity: "My big mistake was love. From this  
day I swear to stay off of love: hetero, homo, bi, dog or cat, car,  
every kind there is. I will found a society of isolates, dedicated to  
this purpose, and this sign, revealed by the same gasoline that almost  
destroyed me, will be its emblem." And he did. . ."

It's clear that I need to read Norbert Wiener's "The Human Use of  
Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society."

On Nov 21, 2013, at 2:26 AM, Fiona Shnapple wrote:

> http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/the-lint-of-the-material
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l