BtZ/BtI: Kubrick/Pynchon

[David Morris]

OK, it had section titles.  I just didn't remember them.

http://www.filmsite.org/twot.html

The film is composed of four episodes. Three of the major sections are
subtitled:

   1.

   *The Dawn of Man *
   A primeval ape man makes a breakthrough - becoming endowed with
   intelligence after experiencing a mysterious black monolith.

   (The Lunar Journey in the Year 2000) - untitled
   Eons later, a similar monolith is discovered on the lunar surface in the
   21st century, sending its signals to Jupiter.
   2. *Jupiter Mission, 18 Months Later *[(in 2001 or 2002)]
   A futuristic, 18-month journey to Jupiter.

   3. *Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite*
   A mystical experience in another time and dimension.

Monoliths link the primeval, futuristic, and mystical sections of the film.
[Note: Originally, the *Discovery* was to visit the planet Saturn, but the
special effects team couldn't realistically reproduce the rings of the
planet, so Jupiter was used instead.]

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 2:56 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> Semi long message in which I conclude that it is my belief that he had
> 2001 in mind, but not my belief that that is evidenced/correct as such, or
> that anyone else should agree.
>
> I keep turning this over in my head.
>
> Every version of the movie I've seen-- digital, in theaters, etc--has had
> the section titles. I have always noticed them, which colors my judgment a
> bit. But maybe that's unique to me: I sometimes obsess over/remember
> language data in a way that feels, I dunno, schizophrenic.
>
> I can share a bit of intuition based on my experience. Enough of the
> intuition (that is, it requires so many deductions made on so many
> less-than-totally-evidenced evaluations/moves) probably accumulates that I
> shouldn't say with great confidence that Pynchon had 2001 in mind.
>
> But.
>
> You all know the work and history more encyclopedically than do I.
>
> One thing I do bring to the table (which probably weakens my judgment a
> lot) is that I've spent most of my adult life writing serious (if not good)
> fiction. Pynchon first appealed because, on some fundamental level, I saw
> him making successful versions of the art I felt I was trying to (read:
> meant to) make. Some of the things in his work that struck me as being
> really familiar/identifiable is a sort of compulsive (in Pynchon
> thematically justified/relevant) movement toward vivid, purposefully
> chosen, often expansive, dense, highly allusive/referential prose. In
> addition to a whole host of other shit he is good at and I want to be good
> at.
>
> So what that means for me is that I have a reasonably informed sense of
> what it feels like to be inside a piece of incomplete fiction, trying to
> choose the right phrase to complete the right idea. The right title. The
> right everything. I'm not saying I know the feeling of succeeding. But I
> had spent thousands of man-hours at least failing at it, if nothing else.
>
> I can't say the experience of Pynchon's mind when he is in front of a
> typewriter resembles anything I've felt or understand. But if it is:
>
> Sentences or ideas are often felt, abstract, but unconscious things in
> your head before you really articulate them. For a writer so concerned with
> truth and consciousness, this moment of translation (zero) is often
> incredibly difficult (and thrilling). You know you need a word to describe
> the thing. Instantly your mind instinctively fills with a cloud of the
> so-many hundred words you can immediately think of that contain the basic
> required data. You keep applying filters that pare down that initial set:
> the word has to mean not only the right thing, but ALL of the right thing.
> And none of anything else. This goes beyond the normal dictionary data. It
> must connote the right things. Have the right rhythm. Make the reader feel
> the right things. Reward (not crumble under) reader inquiry, especially if
> it's a difficult/uncommon or allusive word. There are a thousand criteria
> each possible word must fit, though we can say every writer has his or her
> own idea of what criteria are important and how they're to be evaluated.
> All the ingredients can maybe be understood to cohere into an individual
> style (or at least a work), philosophy, tendency, whatever. One reason I
> think Pynchon's process is at least partially analogous to or
> understandable via my own is that he seems to have a lot of the same
> criteria/compulsions as I do (or aspire to).
>
> Key for my purpose here is compulsion toward referentiality (and it's not
> always toward an articulable end; sometimes it seems to be just the way his
> brain works, though weaving a net--even an ultimately untenable one--seems
> to fit his conceptual/thematic ends). Of course writers also have
> instincts, unconscious ones, and these sometimes create inadvertent
> references or schemata of references (though you might quibble with that on
> philosophical grounds).
>
> If Pynchon is the artist and person I have a fuzzy notion he is, and if
> 2001 is the work of art I believe it is, then I think there is no chance he
> does not see it well in advance of GR's publication.
>
> Yes, 'behinds' and 'zeroes' and 'infinities' maybe are near ubiquitous in
> the SF we know Pynchon is familiar with. But if the conditions of previous
> paragraph are assumed, to be true, then it's also my belief that, qualms
> aside, Pynchon would recognize that 2001 was an outlier that transcended
> the genre.
>
> It is also my belief, based on the way *I* read and relate to him, that if
> his eyes were on the screen for the title of 2001's Jupiter chapter, he
> would have noticed and remembered the phrasing. There is no evidence to
> support this but based on MY understanding of him I think it is more likely
> than, "he might or might not have seen the flick, and if he did, might not
> have paid special attention to it or its chapter titles, because there are
> commonalities across the whole genre." Maybe this is ignorant. Maybe it's
> like me saying: Swanlake is obviously written with Anna Karenina in mind
> because they both experience adulterous romance in Europe.
>
> It's not my contention that Pynchon created the title Beyond the Zero to
> reference 2001, alone or above other things. It is too intricately tied to
> the whole book to be a cheap slap-on.
>
> It is my belief that he could not have chosen that title without, at least
> a coupla times between first choosing it and galleys, noting the kinship.
> (And for an author like him, noticing is as good as planting; if he didn't
> want it there, he would've taken it out.)
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 4, 2016, at 9:52 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't think the sections of 2001 had titles, at least not in the movie
> itself.  Maybe the book did, or critics added them later?
>
> I also think the beautiful transition from spinning bone-weapon to
> spinning space station is wonderful, but depicts an obvious point, one not
> original to 2001, or Pynchon.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 9:32 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> "Beyond the Infinite" strikes me as too generic a science-fictional
>> phrase for a confident linkage with "BtZ," and I at least didn't even
>> notice/remember that 2001 *had* section titles. But there is a sweet
>> metaphorical parallelism between p. 8
>>
>> "God has plucked it [the rocket] for him [Pirate]. out of its airless sky,
>> like a steel banana."
>>
>>
>> and in 2001, the famous Kubrickian transition at the end of the prologue:
>> the hominid's hominicidal bone thrown exultantly into the air, spinning,
>> match-dissolving into the waltz of spaceship and space station. Surely this
>> has been suggested many times before -- I mean, Weisenbuger's GR Companion
>> has a V-2 banana on the cover...
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Is Pynch known to have any particular relationship to *2001*?
>>>
>>> The last section of the movie*t *is called "Jupiter and Beyond the
>>> Infinite". It comes out five years before *GR. *Hard to imagine any
>>> scenario whereby Pynchon doesn't see this movie. Thus doesn't *know *his
>>> title has an overt relationship to the movie chapter.
>>>
>>> Reminds me: there's a David Foster Wallace story in *Oblivion *called
>>> "The Soul Is Not a Smithy," correcting a line from the end of *A
>>> Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man *in which JJ says that the
>>> soul--Dedalus's, anyway--is. A smithy.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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