Bleeding Edge , riffs on the title
Bekah
bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net
Fri Sep 27 15:27:59 CDT 2013
The history of Western crime fiction has changed enormously since Edgar Allen Poe and Wilkie Collins and those early days . I think it's always been at least partly based on the state of technology. The early writers, Collins and Balzac and others (Dickens) were fascinated by what they read in the papers about the very real French criminal/police-spy (etc) Vidocq and used him in some ways as their "detecting" role model. Vidocq helped someone get Scotland Yard set up. Yes they were who-done-its, and the solutions were very cognitive. No autos, no phones, some trains. (See The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Sommerfield - non-fiction - true crime historical, influence on Poe and Collins, etc.)
http://www.sldirectory.com/libsf/booksf/mystery/early.html
Then came Sherlock Holmes type detective who worked as private eye type - the height of the cognitive - basically puzzled for readers. Really emphasized deduction and science. He used the telephone a couple times, but it was really new and there was some controversy. No automobiles, but he sometimes took the train.
Then came the Agatha Christie detectives (H. Poirot and Miss Marple etc.) which had a dead body or more in them but never any actual violence. These were kind of genteel people who tended to use a nice clean poison method (popular in those days anyway) and the gentleman/lady detective was a kind of parlor detective who sometimes had some police assistance. There were "clues" scattered around the narrative as well as a few red herrings. These writers had rules set down by Ronald Knox but they were occasionally breached. The stories did include the telephones or automobile. Poirot often took the train but was picked up by a chauffeur in an automobile.
Old rules: http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/commandments.htm
Enter the Hard Core guys who overlapped with Christie types in the 1930s - Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett - who added what they considered realism to the crime scene - suddenly we have cynical big-city private dicks with a lot of contemporary slang and a different attitude toward a possibly corrupt system and women. These loner-type detectives would use telephones regularly including a lot of pay phones and they read the newspapers while drinking coffee (or whatever) and smoking. They drove cars and there were chases and now plenty of guns.
But it's hard to think up really good "who-done-its" so instead of having good ways of the reader trying to outguess the detective in "who-done-it" the plot turns to "how did the cops get him?" Police procedurals have become popular and Elmore Leonard type novels with his gritty, gritty "realism" in dialogue and events. Rather than using logic and detection these new "cops" use forensics a lot and technology becomes more important. Chase scenes become vital - the stuff of the "thriller" with heavy suspense. The system is often corrupt with "bad guys on the force" or politics or organized money. The thriller and suspense novels came of age adding cell phones and internet access as they entered the public consciousness.
Also today we see the serial writers following a specific detective through a series, Jack Reacher, Dave Robicheaux, Michael Connelly (and many women now, although Collins and Christie had female sleuths.). These are often (not always) more complex characters who have entire lives away from the immediate mystery and the novels follow these private lives (Robicheaux has had at least 3 wives now.)
Finally (I think) there's steampunk mysteries which harkens back to old fashioned technology mixed with new knowledge.
I personally consider Poe and Collins and Christie and Chandler and Leonard and James Lee Burke to be really fine writers - literary actually - because they changed the genre in their own times and in their own ways. These guys stayed with many of the conventions (the crime is solved) without resorting to formula - what they did set a new standard or convention.
Bekah
blabbing and blabbing!
On Sep 27, 2013, at 11:39 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> I think this searching for clues and connections of the detective genre makes it very flexible. And one has to wonder about the rise of the format since Poe and Conan Doyle to the dominant purchase of most libraries. This desire to catch the real culprit has an element of paranoia and our suspicion that we live in a world of unsolved crime is constantly being reinforced by real world information. Mostly the genre gives reassuring closure, but that is not all there is to the form.
>
> On Sep 27, 2013, at 9:44 AM, Monte Davis wrote:
>
>> "Detective story" isn't the first capsule description I'd use, but it's not
>> all that wrong-headed -- especially if you stretch it towards "quest" along
>> the lines of, say, Ross MacDonald's California mysteries and 'Chinatown' (in
>> which whodunnit is secondary to family crimes and secrets reverberating for
>> decades).
>>
>> Stencil, Oedipa, Slothrop, Lew Basnight, Doc Sportello, and Maxine are out
>> there explicitly seeking clues and connections. Charles & Jeremiah and the
>> Chums keep wondering who's *really* behind their orders. Much of Vineland
>> turns on who ratted on whom. All this can be framed -- and in PynchCrit
>> commonly has been framed -- in an alternate language of paranoia and
>> alienation, but I think that TRP (1) absorbed a lot of mystery/detective
>> fiction, and (2) is comfortable with -- and quite unembarrassed by -- many
>> of its tropes.
>>
>> Coincidentally, For your pulpish pleasure:
>> http://boingboing.net/2013/09/26/true-crime-detective-magazines.html
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
>> Of John Bailey
>> Sent: Friday, September 27, 2013 8:33 AM
>> To: Bekah
>> Cc: Christopher Simon; David Morris; Joseph Tracy; P-list List
>> Subject: Re: Bleeding Edge , riffs on the title
>>
>> "I understand this is not mainly a murder mystery."
>>
>> Thank god someone has said it. Why do all of the reviews discuss BE as some
>> sort of detective story? IV was an obvious pot-headed Marlowe caper but BE
>> is no murder mystery. The earliest reviews already mentioned the killing of
>> a character weeks, maybe months before the thing was released, though. As if
>> it was the novel's major motivator, which it ain't, given the several
>> hundred pages before it occurs, and the general lack of relevance that
>> character has up until then.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 10:24 PM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>>> Oh absolutely! I was not meaning to discount the geek-side meaning to
>> the term at all! I was only suggesting a certain amount of layering to the
>> meaning. And yes, the techie meaning was probably the main point of the
>> title. I only said "not to neglect" and "part of the plot." I
>> understand this is not mainly a murder mystery.
>>>
>>> I just checked - pages 78 and 437 use the term "bleeding-edge" (spelled
>> like that) and in both cases it's about technology, not knives or murder.
>>>
>>> Bekah
>>>
>>> On Sep 26, 2013, at 9:24 PM, Christopher Simon <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Prior to reading BE, 99% of the time when I saw the term it was referring
>> to certain Linux distros like Arch. Everything (software) new enough that it
>> came with warnings. Possible instability, much tinkering required to
>> operate. I think that was a main point for title. The dot com bust, 9/11,
>> DeepArcher-level gaming experiences ... all stuff new enough and dangerous
>> enough that everyone was a new user without the requisite skills to see the
>> clear path forward ...
>>>> From: Bekah
>>>> Sent: 9/26/2013 10:41 PM
>>>> To: John Bailey
>>>> Cc: David Morris; Joseph Tracy; P-list List
>>>> Subject: Re: Bleeding Edge , riffs on the title
>>>>
>>>> Not to neglect the fact that part of the plot concerns a murder with a
>> lot of blood and the knife handle gone missing. Only the blade - the edge -
>> is left in the victim.
>>>>
>>>> (trying not to be specific due to spoilers)
>>>>
>>>> Bekah
>>>>
>>>> On Sep 26, 2013, at 7:33 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Both/And? Don't think there's any primary reading - pretty polyvalent
>> metaphor.
>>>>>
>>>>> When I think of the word 'bleed' I think of sound bleed, or image
>>>>> bleed in print, where a signal or whatever travels where it's not
>>>>> supposed to. Noises from next door, or a photo that's accidentally
>>>>> escaped the border it was given on the page. (I recall someone
>>>>> posted a different, more technical definition of edge bleed in
>>>>> relation to publishing).
>>>>>
>>>>> So Bleeding Edges are those points where a very Pynchonian line has
>>>>> been drawn, a border or fence or 0/1 split, but where things
>>>>> nonetheless make it across the excluded middle.
>>>>>
>>>>> Among many, many other things, I imagine.
>>>>>
>>>>> On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 12:23 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>>>> So "bleeding edge" means primarily financial bleeding. Losses. Of
>>>>>> speculators, and all the rest. Money, not Tech.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Wednesday, September 18, 2013, Joseph Tracy wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> At first I thought the reference in the title was obviously to 2
>>>>>>> modern phrases with similar meanings- the cutting edge and the leading
>> edge.
>>>>>>> Somehow I just amalgamated that into a Detective style title with
>>>>>>> blood where the cutting was and didn't think much about it. But it
>>>>>>> is rather a sinister spin on the known phrases themselves. Cutting
>>>>>>> edge has somehow become a generic reference to the borders of
>>>>>>> technology and we use it that way without any real sense that
>>>>>>> something is actually being cut, let alone something that could
>>>>>>> bleed. But Pynchon has a long history of looking at the very
>>>>>>> bloody cutting edges of all colonialist and all technological
>>>>>>> front lines. Where there are blunderbusses, rockets, surveyors,
>>>>>>> trains, mining, drilling, doodoes, hereroes, native north
>>>>>>> americans, electrical marvels, photos killing souls ...there will
>>>>>>> be greed, lust, fighting, blood and mangled bodies. I didn't know
>> that leading edge is not just a similar term but also refers to the forward
>> edge of a wing.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> So even in the title there may be a hint that the cutting edge and
>>>>>>> the leading edge may be the forward momentum of something
>>>>>>> dangerous to the soft flesh of the human, something destructive
>>>>>>> and possibly something self destructive.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> But then I started looking up terms in wikipedia and came across
>>>>>>> the phrase itself-
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Wikipedia: Bleeding edge technology is a category of technologies
>>>>>>> incorporating those so new that they could have a high risk of
>>>>>>> being unreliable and lead adopters to incur greater expense in
>>>>>>> order to make use of them.[1][2] The term bleeding edge was formed
>>>>>>> as an allusion to the similar terms "leading edge" and "cutting
>>>>>>> edge". It tends to imply even greater advancement, albeit at an
>>>>>>> increased risk of "metaphorically cutting until bleeding" because
>>>>>>> of the unreliability of the software or other technology.[3] The
>>>>>>> first documented example of this term being used dates to early
>>>>>>> 1983, when an unnamed banking executive was quoted to have used it
>>>>>>> in reference to Storage Technology Corporation.[4]
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Obviously we are seeing the downside risk of internet technology
>>>>>>> threatening to become its most pervasive political and social
>>>>>>> character as Cheney's Total Information Awareness is started under
>>>>>>> Bush and secretly finished under Obama with much help and side
>>>>>>> benefits from google, verizon, apple, microsoft hackers, etc.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Wikipedia: The leading edge is the part of the wing that first
>>>>>>> contacts the air;[1] alternatively it is the foremost edge of an
>>>>>>> airfoil section.[2] The first is an aerodynamic definition, the
>>>>>>> second a structural one. As an example of the distinction, during
>>>>>>> a tailslide, from an aerodynamic point-of-view, the trailing edge
>>>>>>> becomes the leading edge and vice-versa but from a structural point of
>> view the leading edge remains unchanged.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> ( This aeronautic meaning is clearly a use pynchon would be
>>>>>>> familiar with. Along with the obvious reference to jet aircraft in
>>>>>>> the 9-11 attack It adds a reference to GR that suggests we are
>>>>>>> not quite in the clear from colonialist blowback.)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Wikipedia: Cutting edge or The Cutting Edge may refer to:
>>>>>>> . The cutting surface of a blade or other cutting tool
>>>>>>> . State of the art, the highest level of development, as of
>>>>>>> a device, technique, or scientific field
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Interestingly, in the Margaret Atwood trilogy I just finished ,
>>>>>>> the character who kills most of humanity with a bio-engineered
>>>>>>> disease packaged in a sex drug has a scene where he goes from one
>>>>>>> part of the bio-enngineering complex he manages to another
>>>>>>> constantly referring to the work taking place as cutting edge.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The leading edge has taken on a more genaric spin-
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The Leading Edge: Journal of the Society of Exploration
>> Geophysicists.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> And finally just for fun -here is an actual company who works in
>>>>>>> close alliance with the Golden Fang, Goldman Sachs, The Golden
>>>>>>> Triangle and wherever else the shiny yellow gold is: Leading Edge
>>>>>>> Alliance: LEA Global www.leadingedgealliance.com/ A U.S. based
>>>>>>> international association of independently owned accounting and
>>>>>>> consulting firms whose services are listed as:
>>>>>>> ACCOUNTING & AUDITING, BUSINESS ADVISORY, CORPORATE FINANCE,
>>>>>>> EMPLOYEE BENEFIT SERVICES, ESTATE & EXECUTIVE FINANCIAL PLANNING,
>>>>>>> FINANCIAL PLANNING, HUMAN RESOURCES, INFORMATION SECURITY,
>>>>>>> LITIGATION SUPPORT, RISK, TAX PLANNING & COMPLIANCE, TRANSACTION
>>>>>>> ADVISORY SERVICES, TRANSFER PRICING, VALUATION
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>> -
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