Bleeding Edge: Ducks on Stamps

[Jamie McKittrick]

Are you telling me my 10-year-old self collected all of those Pokymens for
NOTHING?!

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 1:16 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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!
> >>
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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