Target city and greenhouse

Fri Mar 18 10:22:00 CDT 2016

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/can-dostoevsky-still-kick-you-in-the-gut

I take it as given that P. knew his Dostoyevsky, and that both the glass
breaking overhead (while Pirate/the bombed/Jews/all preterites fail to
escape *far below*) and the maybe-about-to-break glass of the *sky-lit,
rooftop* greenhouse are deliberate remappings of the spaces in "Notes from
the Underground."

More broadly, the Crystal Palace and 1851's Great Exhibition were metonymic
for the heights of the UK's Victorian/imperial confidence (as the White
City in Chicago 1893 would be for the rising US in AtD). To talk about that
glass breaking is inevitably to talk about the smashing of that confidence
in WWI and WWII. The abundant, affordable steel and plate glass that made
the CP possible were still  "wonder materials" in 1851, so it's also
inevitably to hint that with the shiny technology comes the potential for
its own destruction.

I can go only part way with the dazzling changes Sloterdijk rings on
"inside vs. outside," which strikes me as -- like any dualism -- almost
*too* powerful and universal a schema. He chooses to start with the
mammalian womb as a unique generative enclosure, and I think: hey, might as
well start with life itself. By definition, the first cell needed a
membrane to control the passage of nutrients/wastes and to separate  its
_milieu interieur_ from an entropic environment.

Which prompts me to ask again about the *positive* valences of the
bananery, which I can't help reading as more -- and better -- than an
ironic continuation of the nightmare's crystal palace. Sure, we are
reminded that the banana trees came by imperial wartime air routes from
slave-founded Brazil -- but warmth, light, fecund composted molecular
chains to provide nourishment and healing "for all the booze-corroded
stomachs of England" (not to mention Osbie Feel's psychotropic drugs)... if
those aren't on the good "counterforce" side of GR's scheme, nothing is.

On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 10:10 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Wow. Dostoevsky was using some incredibly strong language toward the west
> of his time. I didn't quite get the connection of Paxton’s crystal palace
> to the V2. I did  not originally see the dream that literally or
> historically but it relates powerfully when you consider Dostoevsky’s
> words. If that is the image being summoned then the banannery is a  somehow
> more logical contituation of the darker dream. It is amazing how powerfully
> Pynchon texts bear re-examination in the era of hypertext, historic post
> modern context, open source text and instant international communication.
>
>
>
> > On Mar 18, 2016, at 4:52 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 18.03.2016 04:17, Joseph Tracy wrote:
> >
>
> >> I noticed this iron/glass contrast while reading earlier today about
> the bannery.
> banannery
> >> 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
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l /http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
> >>
> >>
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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