BEER Group Read. "How is this day different from any other day?

[Mark Kohut]

I will pick up on this and use it to say what i was going to host about next:
You are reading the book and you are struck by how much is 'mediated'--
soon, Maxine's stereotypes of Vyrva....and, yes, yes, even more than 
Vineland, TV and the simulated reality of games and software and the Net............
 
WE know TRP went deep with McLuhan when young.....the grandfather anthropologist
of our mediated world. 
 
Reading Bleeding Edge made me aware i had read this book enlighteningly. Check it out to see
an erudite philosopher explore all the ways everything is mediated. He even uses Wittgenstein's 
'form of life' notion to say something like This is our Form of Life now. 
THAT, I suggest, is TRP's belief and subject in Bleeding Edge. 
 
http://www.amazon.com/Mediated-Media-Shapes-World-Live/dp/1596910321/ref=sr_1_1?s=books
 
Where do we get unmediated reality?......that is part of a reader's quest, maybe...

And why?...


----- Original Message -----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Cc: 
Sent: Sunday, October 13, 2013 9:01 AM
Subject: Re: BEER Group Read. "How is this day different from any other day?

Pynchon is always cognizant of Dating, seeing as that can be also  
considered a fourth dimension that needs to be mapped as much as the  
meridians of the globe. Dating is central to both CoL49 and BE.

Everybody's memory of an intrusion of another world into the one we  
used to know is going to be different. A point that TRP makes in this  
book is that the agreed upon narrative was fixed for most of the  
country by the Televisual version of the event, driving out the  
alternate narratives. This happened immediately, Pynchon couldn't help  
but notice. If you really lived it, if you were really there, of  
course your memories would be different. The fact that the story was  
"Settled" in the "Newspaper of Record" and Cable "News" so quickly is  
central to this novel,—kinda the point if you catch my drift.


On Oct 13, 2013, at 6:48 AM, Bekah wrote:

> But in BE I think fixing the date specifically in the first sentence  
> is vital to any "correct" reading because the availability of the  
> tech stuff and 9/11 are fixed dates historically.  I looked up a  
> whole lot of the techie stuff to see what was and/or what was not  
> available by late 2001.  (I didn't get so far as exact month.)  -  
> If P is going to fix a date like that he has to live up to it in the  
> rest of the novel - anachronisms are not acceptable.    As far as I  
> was able to find,  he got it all right.  This might be part of the  
> "peek into history" that classics (down the road 50 years)  often  
> provide.  On the downside, it's not quite history to many of us as  
> we read it  - we lived it and our memories differ.
>
> Bekah

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