BtZ42 - The Book

[Mark Kohut]

Just another resonance about it all: Before Dr. Spock's 1945 Baby and Child
Care book---often in our earlier lifetime referred to as The Book [on
child-rearing], the leading baby-raising book was Dr. John(?) Watson's.
Watson a leading behaviorist in America----''never hug your child'. "let
them cry it out"...etc....

On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 7:25 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't think we disagree at all that the "involved social practice"
> surrounding the Book is more than pointless ornament.
>
> I don't think there's any question at all about what book it is.
>
> On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 6:12 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>>
>> Yet still. Laura's thesis that The Book is "given a mystically ritual
>> connotation by its rotation among the various personalities of the White
>> Visitation" seems to be rather confirmed than falsified by the episode
>> you're quoting from. This social practice respectively context is as
>> important as the source text itself. There are Pointsman's marginalia, the
>> mysterious origin of the copy, the secrecy of its use, the occasionally
>> religious character of the debates - "'Pierre Janet --- sometimes the man
>> talked like an Oriental mystic. (...)'/'I don't want to get into a
>> religious debate with you (...), but I wonder ...'" (p. 88) -, plus the
>> motto of the episode, making fun of authentic sources in general:
>>
>> "Better behave yourself or we'll send you back to Dr. Jamf!
>>
>> When Jamf conditioned *him*, he threw away the stimulus.
>>
>> Looks like Dr. Jamf's been by to see *your* little thing today, hasn't
>> he?
>>
>>      --- *Neil Nosepicker's Book of 50,000 Insults*,
>>                                 §6.72, 'Awful Offspring,'
>>                                 The Nayland Smith Press,
>>                                 Cambridge (Mass.), 1933"
>>
>> (p. 83, Picador/Viking)
>>
>> And then Pavlov died in 1936, while the action here takes place in 1944.
>> In the meantime, science, due to the war, started to become big science.
>> With the rise of the Rocket, and its societal implications
>> ("Raketenstadt"), the rules of research are changing: Roger "feels the
>> foundation of that discipline [statistics] trembling, a bit now, deeper
>> than oddity ought to drive. Odd, odd, odd---think of the word: such white
>> finality in its closing clap of tongue. It implies moving past the
>> tongue-stop---beyond the zero---and into the other realm. Of course you
>> don't move past. But you do realize, intellectually, that's how you
>> *ought* to be moving." (p. 85). And Ivan Pavlov - "(h)e was realistic
>> enough not to expect it [the true mechanical explanation] in his lifetime.
>> Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope was for a long chain of better
>> and better approximations" (p. 89) - appears, all of sudden, pretty
>> outmoded in the shining new light of Raketenstadt.
>>
>> So yes, Weisenburger is correct in identifying The Book as volume 2 of
>> Pavlov's lectures on conditioned reflexes. But his characterization of the
>> involved social practice as "having no particular purpose" and "a bit of
>> melodrama from the narrator" raises doubts whether he really thought the
>> issue through. To identify a source is not the same as understanding its
>> use by the author. And of course, The Book (note the caps!) does also refer
>> to the Bible. The missing link here is "shit, money, and the Word" (p. 28)
>> ...
>>
>>
>>
>> On 27.04.2016 09:21, Monte Davis wrote:
>>
>> LK> Is there any textual justification for Weisenburger's explanation
>> later in the book?
>>
>>
>> pp. 87-88 (Viking):
>>
>>
>> "Pointsman has been talking about paranoia and the “idea of the
>> opposite.” He has scribbled in The Book exclamation points and *how true*
>> s all about the margins of Pavlov’s open letter to Janet concerning the *sentiments
>> d'emprise*, and of Chapter LV, “An Attempt at a Physiological
>> Interpretation of Obsessions and of Paranoia”—he can’t help this bit of
>> rudeness, although the agreement among the seven owners was not to mark
>> up The Book—it was too valuable for that sort of thing, they’d had to put
>> in a guinea apiece. It was sold him on the sly, in the dark, during a
>> Luftwaffe raid (most existing copies had been destroyed in their
>> warehouse early in the Battle of Britain). Pointsman never even saw the
>> seller’s face, the man vanishing into the hoarse auditory dawn of the
>> all‑clear, leaving the doctor and The Book, the dumb sheaf already heating
>> up, moistening in his tight hand . . . yes it might have been a rare
>> work of erotica, certainly that coarse hand‑set look to the type . . . the
>> crudities in phrasing, as if Dr. Horsley Gantt’s odd translation were in
>> cipher, the plaintext listing shameful delights, criminal transports..."
>>
>>
>> If there's another book combining that letter to Janet, that Chapter LV
>> title, that translator, and that history of the first printing, I'm all
>> ears.
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 1:09 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Jumping to the end of the section - p. 47:
>>>
>>> "Spectro is one of the original seven owners of The Book, and if you ask
>>> Mr. Pointsman what Book, you'll only get smirked at."
>>>
>>> Weisenburger is quick to identify The Book as volume 2 of Pavlov's
>>> Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes. He adds that the secrecy of rotating the
>>> book between various owners has no particular purpose, calling it "a bit of
>>> melodrama from the narrator."
>>>
>>> My gut reaction is, fuck off, Weisenburger! Is there any textual
>>> justification for Weisenburger's explanation later in the book? There's
>>> certainly none here. It seems way too prosaic and non-Pynchonian an
>>> interpretation. Have I missed something?
>>>
>>> I read The Book as deliberately obscure - an unholy book of (perhaps)lab
>>> data, meticulously and secretively collected, and given a mystically ritual
>>> connotation by its rotation among the various personalities of the White
>>> Visitation.
>>>
>>> Laura
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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