BtZ/BtI: Kubrick/Pynchon

[Monte Davis]

Stefan Banach: "A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between
theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between
proofs, and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories.
One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see
analogies between analogies."

Which has no necessary bearing (in either mathematics or belles-lettres) on
whether they're fruitful analogies.

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 3:56 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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