Thomas Pynchon Explained In GIFs Form

Sat May 10 18:00:35 CDT 2014

MN> either not interested in this part of the world or, in his system of
the world, global problems he's dealing with, lie deeper than the "evil
empire"...

I lean to the second (that "greed and fear" quotation). I've long thought
that his unique version of original sin, Gnostic fall, capture by Maya, is
prior to any political/ideological wrong paths. I also wonder if he might
not feel some humility and tact in the face of the largest tragedies of
that damned 20th century -- almost all of which are offstage, implied,
glimpsed around corners. That certainly doesn't prevent him from conveying
all the sorrow and pity of it I can handle.

On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 2:49 PM, Max Nemtsov <max.nemtsov at gmail.com> wrote:

>  this is what made me wonder, too. but then i found a sort of answer in V.
>
> "Not so. Because: all along the first thread, from a young, crude Mata
> Hari act in Egypt - as always, in no one's employ but her own - while
> Fashoda tossed sparks in search of a fuse; until 1913 when she knew she'd
> done all she could and so took time out for love - all that while,
> something monstrous had been building. Not the War, nor the socialist
> tide which brought us Soviet Russia. Those were symptoms, that's all."
>
> symptoms, that's all. he clearly is either not interested in this part of
> the world or, in his system of the world, global problems he's dealing
> with, lie deeper than the "evil empire" (this country turns back to now)
>
> imho, of course
> Mx
>
>
> On 10.05.2014 21:02, Monte Davis wrote:
>
>  I'm just finishing Against the Day again: recall that circa 1919 (p.
> 1024) we see "... the old *Bolshai’a Igra*... The Romanoff crest had
> vanished from its envelope, which instead was now all a single chaste
> expanse of saturated red, and the ship’s name had been changed to *Pomne
> o Golodayushchiki. '*Remember the Starving,' explained Captain
> Padzhitnoff...these days his ship and crew flew everywhere across Europe
> and Inner Asia, no longer dropping brickwork but sending food, clothing
> and— since a great influenza epidemic the boys had not till now been
> aware of—
> 
> medical supplies, gently down by parachute to whatever populations below were
> in need of them.
> "
>
>  The Russian dirigible, while pointedly "red," is floating out of the new
> government's control, just as the Inconvenience is becoming independent of
> the shadowy (capitalist? imperialist?) Chums of Chance headquarters. We
> have seen the tsarist state almost entirely in terms of 1) Its "Great
> Games" in central Asia and the Balkans, and (2) its barely acculturated
> Islamic and shamanic reaches; we will see nothing of its successor.
> Similarly in GR, we see the rocket-hunting great power game of the Zone and
> the remote Kirghizhstan of the 1920s, but only glimpses of the USSR of 1945.
>
>  I'm not saying that either book conceals (let alone excuses or favors)
> the authoritarian communism of the USSR, but it's not unfair to say that it
> elides the matter compared to its treatment of authoritarian forces in
> 20th-century Europe and the US. AtD both celebrates anarchism and trade
> unionism and explicitly foreshadows the death of the former in WWI: "Industrial
> corporations, armies, navies, governments, all would go on as before, if
> not more powerful. But in a general war among nations, every small
> victory Anarchism has struggled to win so far would simply turn to dust."
> (Ratty McHugh, p. 938)
>
>  What Pynchon *doesn't* do is engage in any depth with the theoretical
> communism of pre-1914, which coexisted and at times overlapped with
> anarchism and the union movement, or with the actuality of state communism
> after 1917. The latter managed to co-opt enough of the workers' hopes and
> rhetoric of the earlier period to seem a desirable alternative to many for
> decades to come, although it was as top-down, controlling and brutal. That'
> betrayal -- and reluctance to see it -- was long a sore spot for the
> American left (which may be why Pynchon elides it), and an all-too-easy
> avenue of attack for the American right.
>
>  You mention the relation of "the intellectual lineage of fascism" to
> "the project of objective scientific inquiry." In the spirit of double
> refraction, we (if not Pynchon) we might also contemplate the intellectual
> lineage of "scientific socialism," i.e. Marxist-Leninist claims of
> historical inevitability (shepherded by a vanguard party elite, of
> course)... and decades of prominent Soviet (and then Chinese) enthusiasm
> for  science, heavy industry, vast infrastructure projects, collective
> farming, etc. I think both have the same roots not only in the
> Enlightenment, but also in the "ancient forces of greed and fear" (IV 130)
> behind *all* ideologies of control and domination.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 5:06 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>>
>> >> It would be fair to say, though, that Pynchon is obsessed with the
>> relationship between reason and authoritarianism, and specifically with how
>> the intellectual lineage of fascism—both its roots in the Enlightenment,
>> and the way it informs present-day social and political structures—is
>> intimately related to the project of objective scientific inquiry.<<
>>
>> This sums it up for me.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 09.05.2014 21:23, Dave Monroe wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/gif-explainers-explained-in-thomas-pynchon-explained-1573696149
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>  -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
>
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