Bleeding Edge: Ducks on Stamps

[John Bailey]

I think stamps in Lot 49 are about sovereignty and power and freedom
from state control, as befits the time it was written. The reference
in BE seems more about stamps as a currency, and much like Alice has
argued that some P works are about WORK, I reckon you could read BE as
a meditation on CURRENCY and value and the conversions between in an
age in which sovereignty and freedom are kinda moot pipe-dreams.

Steiner's paintings are like hyperreal versions of the classic
three-ducks-on-the-wall, the archetypal representation of kitsch art
in Americana, but here reanimated the way Hellenism reanimated archaic
and classical art styles. So much movement, so dynamic, but perhaps
all that movement covers an essential emptiness.

So much of BE is about trading currencies. Not just Horst's work with
the markets but the dotcommas making money from the virtual, real
people converted into signs, politics traded as blogs and newspaper
reports and rumours. Death is less a tragedy than a transaction cost.

The passage Kai quoted makes explicit reference to Pokemon ("must have
them all"), and the motive in both stamp and Pokemon collecting is one
that is also taken advantage of in game design - the compulsion loop,
which feeds virtual rewards for getting closer to completing sets,
even though they have no inherent value at all. I think this is the
kind of late capitalist harnessing of addictive urges is rife in BE,
so long after IV, and some of it points back to the New Mexico border
and the fallout of the drug trade that may be the novel's equivalent
of the absent Holocaust in GR. The dotcom boom was fueled by rampant
cocaine use and the level of horror that trade produced south of the
border is only becoming widely known today. But Central America is
central to BE, and I feel that might be why.

But the morally neutered borderliners are hardly going to make
connections with the death trade in New Mexico, let alone that of Nazi
Germany. Better to make a joke about that "gas bill".

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 9:01 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> I also see stamps, starting, of course, in the Crying as the national way we are
> all one, all able to communicate. Post offices in every city.
> Handwritten letters
> that signify---as James puts it in Portrait of a Lady.  I think the
> Stamp Act resonates; Henry
> Adams noticing in his history of the US that parts of NYC and Philly
> had up to seven (7) mail deliveries a
> day in 1800...
>
> Lost in that book so an alternative communication system must fill in.
>
> Collecting kitschy duck stamps, "not valid for postage", also might signify how
> much further lost is the signification of the above. Yes, "largely
> decorative and thus
> irrelevant" but even Norm's work made it earn 'a small fee'....small
> but real worth in the US of A.
>
> On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 6:18 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>
>> Pynchon writes about stamps also in other books like The Crying of Lot 49.
>> Communicative representations of order, --- a profane kinda Tarot ...
>>
>> "Tracking from one group of attendees to another, locating presently a
>> normal-enough looking citizen with an interest in migratory-bird hunting and
>> conservation stamps, known to collectors as duck stamps, and his
>> perhaps-less-involved wife, Gladys---
>>  ' ... and my dream is to become the Bill Gross of duck stamps.' Not only
>> federal duck stamps, mind you, but every state issue as well---having
>> wandered with the years into the seductive wetlands of philatelic zealotry,
>> this by-now-shameless completist must have them all, hunters' and
>> collectors' versions, artist-signed, remarques, varieties, freaks and
>> errors, governors' editions ... 'New Mexico! New Mexico issued duck stamps
>> only from 1991 through 1994, ending with the crown jewel of all duck stamps,
>> Robert Steiner's supernaturally beautiful Green-Winged Teals in Flight, of
>> which I happen to own a plate block ...'
>>  'Which someday,' Gladys announces chirpily, 'I am going to take out of its
>> archival plastic, compromise the gum on the back with my slobbering tongue,
>> and use to send in the gas bill.'
>>  'Not valid for postage, honeybunch.'"  (Bleeding Edge, pp. 13-14)
>>
>> This is an article on Robert Steiner which contains examples of his work:
>> http://www.steinerprints.com/master_of_duck_stamps.pdf
>>
>> So here we have a man avoiding relationship with his wife by developing a
>> mania for collecting duck stamps. Collecting mania (dt. "Sammelwut") is a
>> well known phenomenon, but what about the ducks? Is there an Arcanum of US
>> history which involves ducks? Or does, perhaps, the word "duck," like
>> "beaver," carry in American English a sexual connotation? And if so, which?
>> There is a very famous movie where ducks on stamps do appear, and this movie
>> is "Fargo" by the Coen Brothers from 1996. You remember Marge's husband
>> Norm? He's painting ducks, and in the end of the movie one of his motives
>> makes it on a small fee stamp. Pynchon most certainly knows the movie, but
>> on first look it's hard to see any connection between these two artistic
>> representations of ducks on stamps. Isn't Pynchon's character a caricature
>> while the Coen Brothers' one is a likable human being supporting the movie's
>> heroine? Yes and no. Norm is likable but also, as all the good people in
>> "Fargo" are, a little simple minded and naive; his art is decorative and
>> thus largely irrelevant:
>>
>>> He is a folk artist, and from the brief glimpses, both visual and spoken,
>>> his thing seems to be ducks. Given the profusion of tacky statuettes in the
>>> movie, this raises a red flag: his creations are part of that dreary
>>> cultural landscape I described earlier, a landscape decorated with kitschy,
>>> unimaginative art. The selection of his mallard painting for a postage stamp
>>> seems at first like an affirmation of his artistic ability, but in fact, it
>>> is yet another exercise in misdirection. What it signifies in context is the
>>> larger society’s embrace of the bland, repetitive and predictable. <
>>
>> https://thisruthlessworld.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/what-does-this-movie-mean-the-coen-brothers-fargo-1996/
>>
>> "Bland, repetitive and predictable" is also the behavior of the borderliners
>> on the cruise ship. While I personally like the works of Robert Steiner as
>> far as I know them, it wouldn't be completely unfair to call them "kitschy,
>> unimaginative art." And since the borderliners' cruise ship journey does
>> stand in a certain sense for Western culture in general, Pynchon seems to be
>> saying that we're left with either Reg's digital tape-it-all-positivism or
>> with the questionable achievements of handmade paintings of idealized
>> nature. This does not meet the complexity of things. Is Pynchon here also
>> self-referential?
>>
>> Und jetzt schafft 'was, ihr Nullen!
>>
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