Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and Pynchon

[Steven Koteff]

Thanks for the post, Monte. Last line in particular seems to have a lot of weight in the cultural stagnation discussion. 

Maybe if TV is its own intra-meta universe we can think of it like a testing ground for ideas about entropy, about life and death. Genuine life-affirming television exists, of course. TV that deserves a place with the best art we've made. But the forces of the marketplace, the studio, cycle between indifference, to trying to snuff it out, to coopting it and incorporating it into their brand (the Netflix model). This last one, as a force of death, is most seductive, subtlest, hardest to do battle with. Relevant to that post, the question is: does it have to be a monocultural force that leads to stagnation, or is it actually just home to the same competing forces we see everywhere else, meaning some TV does not reduce us but unites us? I say this as someone who spent the first twenty years of his life watching television obsessively, at every possible second. 

> On Jan 20, 2016, at 6:22 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I can no longer read about the Navy in Pynchon without thinking of Robert Stone (same age, USN c. 1955-1958) recalling the Norfolk street musician whom he didn't use and Pynchon did, or rowdy liberties in Capetown, or this "balloon goes up" passage from 'Prime Green':
> 
> Once, at Ismailia, I nearly got to fire the five-inch in anger. It was October 1956 and we were evacuating American civilians from the Suez Canal Zone. Mystère jets from the French carrier Lafayette were bombing the harbor areas, sending donkeys and baskets of figs and women wrapped in folds of cloth high in the air. Coming in, the planes would seem to be touching our radar masts. We had a huge American flag with spotlights on it. Our position was helpless, tied up at what they call Med Mole, a system of docking used in many Mediterranean ports, where the fantail of the ship is up against the pierside and a boat runs to the landing station. Each time a plane came over we would awkwardly track it with our five-inch and our fifty-caliber, waiting for the order to fire, really wanting to hear it. American sailors have been known to die by mistake in the Middle East, usually victims of Israeli fire forgetting its friendliness for a few hours. But we in the amphib Navy were ready to start our own little naval war with France. It would, I think, have been the second. But fortunately none of our civilians were hurt and the French were bluffing. Egyptians died, though, begging us for protection, and we were moored close enough to them to take it personally. A general rage spread among all hands, a rage of battle I had never seen before. 
> 
> I had to be grateful for all that. I was. I was not going to forget the migrating birds in the Indian Ocean or Mount Erebus smoking. Or the human factors: my fatuousness, as I reflected more and more on it. 
> 
> More than anything I was to remember the people, the Australians and New Zealanders as they were fifty years ago, the variety of young Americans to be found in the Navy, recruited from pre-television America, a place more varied than younger people today imagine.
> 
>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 4:10 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Get me Rewrite: Lose that "just"...
>> 
>> He got so many stories and characters from his Navy experience. 
>> And he so disses academia vs real experience. 
>> 
>> he writes that in American society in the Eisenhower years
>> "there seemed to be no reason why it should all not just go on as it was."
>> [notice his use of 'just']....Talk about Entropy, cultural stasis as entropy and a 
>> cultural judgment shared by many other writers and thinkers, I think. 
>> And how he embraced and learned from the break-out artists. 
>> 
>> (Again, one of my favorite images, not shared by many, is Phoenix having
>> to walk back and forth between the walls in the master's house in The Master)
>> 
>>> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 9:06 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Just Zeitgeist synchronicity.   Just? as in merely?   What was in the wind is probably more important than sources, no? 
>>> And more so, as Pynchon explains in that SL Introduction, once he begins to gain confidence and stop all the fancy dancing kid stuff and get out On the Road, a Wandering Scholar. BTW, F S Fitzgerald quit school and did a stint in the army too.  
>>> 
>>>> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 8:13 AM, Perry Noid <coolwithdoc at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Oh wow. I never bothered to compare the publishing dates. Something must have been in the air I suppose. 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Tuesday, January 19, 2016, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Mumbo Jumbo was published in 1972. I cannot easily find out what month. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Gravity's Rainbow was published early in 1973.
>>>>> Which means the GR manuscript was turned over to Viking by summer
>>>>> 1972. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Which makes the mention late in GR a shout-out to a book he likes a lot.
>>>>> An incorporated blurb as it were providing a cool aside about a new writer. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> There is evidence---Catch -22 probably---that even then Pynchon was able to read 
>>>>> some new novels in manuscript or galley form. But if he couldn't read Mumbo-Jumbo
>>>>> this way, then he must have read it as he was finishing up and or proofing GR
>>>>> himself. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> If he could have read it earlier than 1972, most of GR was finished anyway so
>>>>> no major influence. Just Zeitgeist synchronicity. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> which leads to the next post. 
> 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160120/82467782/attachment.html>