Target city and greenhouse

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On 18.03.2016 04:17, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> I noticed this iron/glass contrast while reading earlier today about the bannery. Iron/steel and glass are materials linked to the technological era. They both responded to mass production techniques and are inexpensive, technically flexible and durable. How we look at them is equally flexible. They can be cold, sharp,  and ominous; they can imprison.  They can also carry us swiftly in comfort,  open us to the light, provide lenses micro and macroscopic. Pynchon seems to use this contrast in aspects of the same materials to show the dualities of the technologies of the modern era.

"In 1862, only a few years after release from a Siberian prison camp, 
Dostoevsky travelled to London and found the capital of capitalism 
bewitched by a very different enclosure. He visited the site for 
the International Exhibition in South Kensington, meant to trump 
the Crystal Palace that dominated the same space in the previous decade, 
and may also have made the trip to Sydenham, in south-east London, where 
Joseph Paxton's original had been relocated.

These almost immaterial, climate-controlled hothouses of glass and steel 
disturbed the Russian novelist almost as much as had his Siberian house 
of the dead. He took them as metaphors of western civilisation, immune 
systems that brought the world's most diverting flora, fauna and 
industrial products under one roof, while whatever remained outside 
(war, genocide, slavery, unpleasant tropical diseases) dwindled into 
irrelevance.

If you want to understand modern capitalism and consumer society, argues 
the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, you'd better explore the 
ramifications of Dostoevsky's metaphor. "He recognised the monstrous 
edifice as a man-eating structure," Sloterdijk writes, "a cult container 
in which humans pay homage to the demons of the west: the power of money 
and pure movement."

Sloterdijk sees Paxton's spawn everywhere today – crystal palaces 
containing the one and half billion winners of globalisation, while 
three times that number are excluded, some with their noses up against 
the glass until security guards hose them down. "Who can deny," he 
writes, "that in its primary aspects, the western world – especially the 
European Union – embodies such a great interior today?" Who can deny, 
either, that the internet realises in cyberspace Paxton's dream of 
immateriality and of abolishing distance? "Experience the Arctic and the 
Amazon without the jet lag," goes the ad. "Trek with Google Maps" ...

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/01/world-interior-capital-peter-sloterdijk-review

>> On Mar 17, 2016, at 12:12 AM, Monte Davis<montedavis49 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>> p. 2: "Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace."
>>
>> p. 7: "Trusswork is pierced by daylight, milky panes beam beneficently down. How could there be a winter—even this one—gray enough to age this iron that can sing in the wind, or cloud these windows that open into another season, however falsely preserved?"
>>
>> As different as nightmare and daybreak. The bananery is benign, although this description is bracketed by Pirate's waking rocket terror: "He feels he's about to shit... The pores of his face are prickling... sweat lies on his skin almost as cold as ice."  Are these two iron-and-glass enclosures the same, seen from two sides of the gate of horn -- or is it ivory? Alternatives? Either/or? Both/and?
>>
>> And don't forget Callisto's change-defying (-denying?) greenhouse in "Entropy."
>>
>> *
>> "All that was left standing [of the relocated Crystal Palace] after the 1936 fire were the two water towers.... The south tower to the right of the Crystal Palace entrance was taken down shortly after the fire, as the damage sustained had undermined its integrity and it presented a major risk to houses nearby.
>>
>> "The north tower was demolished with explosives in 1941. No reason was given for its removal, although it was rumoured that it was to remove a landmark for WWII German aircraft, but Luftwaffe bombers actually navigated their way to Central London by tracking the River Thames. The Crystal Palace grounds were also used as a manufacturing base for aircraft radar screens and other hi-tech equipment of the time. This remained secret until well after the war."
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Palace
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