"You Can't Run a War on Gusts of Emotion."

[Monte Davis]

I've puzzled over "your sound will be the sizzling night" for 43 years now,
with no progress on what it *means*. I'm pretty sure, though, that in GR's
WWII context of blasted/burning cities (and the death camps' incinerators
implicit beyond), what makes it stick is that awful meaty/cooking
association of "sizzling" -- not the searing or scorching or blazing night,
but the  *sizzling* night. Marshmallows and s'mores, anyone?

The Blackett quotation is a rich, rich vein:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Blackett
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research

There's a lot of the Mexico/Pointsman complex of themes in the latter: cool
mathematical analysis of,  how to marshal and route Atlantic convoys
against U-boats, or whether bomber crews would survive better with more
armor (against defensive flak and fighters) or less armor and more speed.
"Gusts of emotion" was Blackett's sarcastic shorthand for many high
military officers' insistence that by God, they dealt with real life and
death every day, and had nothing to learn from ivory-tower boffins with no
combat experience.

GR primes us to recoil, quite rightly, from any such cool "technical"
assessment: that way, we feel, lies Dr. Strangelove and Gen. Buck
Turgidson's "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say
no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops."

And yet, and yet... there's a compelling case that the V-2 itself was one
of Hitler's "gusts of emotion": vengeance in a losing cause, no matter how
costly and militarily pointless. And that the RAF/USAAF heavy bomber
campaigns against German cities represented Allied "gusts of emotion": In
the inter-war years, that strategic planning and procurement embodied the
hope that enemy war industries and transport could be "surgically"
destroyed, forestalling land combat losses. And when it turned out that the
bombers couldn't in fact do that, the campaigns were redoubled and tuned
for city-burning, because... well, basically because we'd built the bombers
and trained the crews, and had to be doing *something* until we were ready
to invade, and besides, what about Guernica and Warsaw and Rotterdam and
the Blitz -- they started it, dammit! In that perspective, one could well
wish there had been more cool analysis, not less.

"Only by the acme of good taste," as Kenneth Burke always sez, "can we
distinguish our own wise selection of means from the scapegoat devices of
the ignorant -- and much deep sympathy is required to distinguish our
reasoning from another's rationalizing."

On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 10:39 PM, gary webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Fascinating, as Mr. Spock sez, ...
>
> "He will actually skip to and fro, with his knees high and twirling a
> walking stick with W.C. Fields' head, nose, top hat, and all, for its knob,
> and surely capable of magic, while the band plays a second chorus.
> Accompanying will be a phantasmagoria, a real on, rushing toward the
> screen, in over the heads of the audiences, on little tracks of an elegant
> Victorian cross section resembling the profile of a chess knight conceived
> fancifully but not vulgarly so-... (pg.12)"
>
> I actually love this section, strange personal side note. The W.C. Fields
> imagery, and references which will occur again, as well as, perhaps more
> profoundly, is the chess knight. Blogett Waxwing and Gerdhardt Von Goll,
> aslo know as Der Springer, is another reoccuring symbol...
>
> Perhaps, Pynchon is telling where Prentice aligns on the spectrum, if such
> a spectrum even exists...
>
> An interesting side note...
>
> does anyone out there have any enlightening commentary on "...*your sound
> will be the sizzling night...eh?" *
>
> Not that the plot of the novel hinges on this phrase or anything, but it
> has always kind-of dumbfounded me... sort-of an subconscious commentar ...?
> Don't know...
>
> I leave it to the jury...
>
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