Octopus, oh Octopus!

Sun Jun 12 08:57:36 CDT 2016

I'm with Monte's mental leanings here, fwiw.
Vote, y'all.
Early explorer Schaub slipping up colorlessly maybe, or Davis after lots
more learning?

On Sun, Jun 12, 2016 at 9:17 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> One more octopus note to append to my quotation from Schaub that classes
> gray Grigori with other colorlessnesses and against "gaudy Tyrone in his
> Hawaiian shirt":
>
> Would that be the case if Pynchon had known more about octopus color
> changes (for camouflage, probably communication, and for all we know fun)?
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE0QqxwyL_8 and related clips
>
> The more we learn about cephalopods' chromatophores and their distributed
> nervous systems, the more they seem a fascinating (and definitely gaudy)
> alternative to ours as imagined on pp, 147-148
>
> On Sun, Jun 12, 2016 at 8:08 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Had to think of Slothrop and Grigori - "Holy shit it's *moving*---an
>> octopus? Yes it is the biggest fucking octopus Slothrop has ever seen
>> outside of the movies ..." (p. 186) - yesterday, when I was reading Bret
>> Easton Ellis' "Glamorama" from 1998 in the translation of Joachim Kalka. In
>> chapter 13 of part 2, the protagonist Victor Ward meets a director of
>> photography named Felix who tells him about an animal horror film he just
>> did. It's called - my ad hoc 're-turn translations' from page 336 likely
>> will differ slightly from Ellis' original words - "Sh! The Octopus"
>> (actually there is, as I just saw, a movie of that title from 1937, but
>> this remake is apparently fictional) and the third part of a serial. The
>> first movie is titled "Attention! The Octopus", the second "Alas! The
>> Octopus", and the last one so far bears the working title "Let's scram! The
>> Octopus". The serial is financed by Ted Turner. While Felix is in general
>> not happy with "Sh! The Octopus" he nevertheless - "and Al Sharpton took
>> part as Whitney Houston's extremely embittered father --- the embittered
>> harpooner" -  praises the casting and reports to Victor that - "really
>> ironic, isn't it?" - David Hasselhoff is the first victim of the octopus.
>>
>> Like Slothrop, I once met an octopus in the Mediterranean Sea. I was
>> diving near the Balearic Islands and saw it on a plateau. When the creature
>> realized me it communicated unmistakably that it wished to be left alone.
>> First - I kid you not! - it took with one of its arms a little stone  and,
>> while uttering a bark like sound,  threw it in my direction, and then the
>> octopus spread its ink and got lost, somewhere in the undersea scenery ...
>>
>> When I think about the octopus in literature - in the visual arts there
>> is Hokusai's "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife", and "Octopus' Garden" by
>> The Beatles in music - the first author coming to my mind is Ernst Jünger.
>> For a couple of semesters during the mid 1920s Jünger studied not only
>> philosophy but also biology. First in Leipzig, then, following his zoology
>> professor Georg Grimpe who had joined the Stazione Zoologica di Napoli, in
>> Naples. (Interestingly enough, Grimpe, who belongs to the German professors
>> who declared their 'Avowal to Adolf Hitler' in November 1933, had obtained
>> his doctorate with a dissertation on the vascular system of Octopoda.) The
>> Stazione Zoologica di Napoli had (and still has) an aquarium where Ernst
>> Jünger was observing a small octopus species named Loligo media for a
>> couple of weeks. Not that anything in terms of science originated from
>> that, but in "Das Abenteuerliche Herz" (The Adventurous Heart) we find a
>> piece that expresses Jünger's aesthetic fascination with the creature. In
>> that piece, which in the second edition bears the title "Frutti de Mare",
>> he praises the octopus' ability to first burst into colors - "outta
>> floating scale of brown, yellow, violet and purple shades" - and then to
>> pale all of sudden, after which "only the deeply green-golden rings, which
>> are enameling the eyes, are emitting an afterglow like rainbows". Jünger
>> also emphasizes that to eyes used to the paler shimmer of the North the
>> colors of a Southern Sea are of inexhaustible charm and linked to dreams
>> and the night.
>>
>> "Seit einigen Wochen habe ich mich hier seßhaft gemacht, als Dottore
>> precatore, wie das Volk die in den Räumen des Aquariums arbeitenden
>> Zoologen zu nennen liebt. Es ist ein kühler, klösterlicher Ort, an dem bei
>> Tag und Nacht süßes und salziges Wasser in große, gläserne Becken sprudelt,
>> inmitten eines Parks, der sich am Meer erstreckt. (...) Meine
>> Aufmerksamkeit ist einem kleinen Tintenfisch gewidmet, der Loligo media
>> heißt und mich jeden Morgen von neuem durch die Schönheit seines farbigen
>> Schwanengesanges entzückt, den er aus einer fließenden Skala brauner,
>> gelber, violetter und purpurner Töne kombiniert. Insbesondere liebe ich
>> eine köstliche Art des Erblassens an ihm, eine nervöse Nachlässigkeit,
>> durch die er neue, unerhörte Überraschungen  vorzubereiten pflegt.
>> Allzubald fällt diese Pracht dem Tode anheim; sie erlischt gleich
>> flammenden Wolken, die sich im Feuchten auflösen, und nur die tief
>> grüngoldenen Ringe, die die großen Augen emaillieren, leuchten wie
>> Regenbogen nach. Auf seinem spannenlangen Körper spielt das Leben seine
>> berauschende Melodie; es überschüttet ihn mit seinem Überflusse und läßt
>> ihn gleich einer grausamen Geliebten im Stich. Nach so viel Glanz bleibt
>> der Überrest wie ein bleicher Schemen, wie die ausgebrannte Hülse eines
>> goldenen Feuerwerks zurück. (...) Was ein südliches Meer an Geheimnissen
>> birgt, das ist für die an blasseren Schimmer gewöhnten Augen des Nordens
>> von unerschöpflichem Reiz. (...) Diese Farben sind traumhafter; sie gehören
>> eher der Nacht als dem Tage an; sie bedürfen des dunkelblauen Abgrundes zum
>> Schutz. Zuweilen klingen sie in ihren satten violetten und dunkelroten
>> Flecken, die sich in ein Fleisch brennen, das feinen weißen, rosa oder
>> gelblichen Porzellanarten gleicht, an gewisse Orchideen wie die Stanhopea
>> an --- ..."
>>
>> (Ernst Jünger: Das Abenteuerliche Herz. Zweite Fassung. Figuren und
>> Capriccios. Reclam edition, pp. 55-58)
>>
>> In Hans Biedermann's lexicon of symbols (see Knauers Lexikon der Symbole,
>> p. 312-313) it says that the octopus did have a mythic-symbolic meaning in
>> Greek antiquity which is still unknown. Biedermann also speculates that the
>> octopus might have been the real world model for both, Medusa's head and
>> the Scylla. "The dark cloud of ink worked as a symbol of the animal's
>> affinity to higher powers." Later the octopus was, in liaison with the
>> prawn, occasionally allocated to the astrological sign of Cancer. The ink
>> of the octopus was used as writing ink, and its bite was considered to be
>> toxic.
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> http://images.google.de/imgres?imgurl=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Hokusai_The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s_Wife.jpg&imgrefurl=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hokusai_The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s_Wife.jpg&h=467&w=670&tbnid=r-k95iOqUTHhlM:&tbnh=121&tbnw=174&docid=PczI0oAcogzWDM&usg=__9OI_jjvKccm1qvKSe8wcNfGQjKs=&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwivzY6E-qHNAhVBG5oKHVmfBtAQ9QEIIDAB
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n3LdjeCK5I
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------
>>
>> " ... Apirana prepares the traditional bone needles, gives her a piece of
>> rope to bite down on, and begins to punch the tips dipped in black ink into
>> the skin of the young girl's back./ As if he were a dark Pygmalion, he runs
>> his skilled hand in rehearsal over the places he intends to draw menacing
>> black clouds, gruesome krakens emerging from the troughs ..."
>>
>> (Christian Kracht: Imperium, p. 166)
>>
>>
>>
>
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