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

[ish mailian]

How I enjoy these readings, when we dig into the book, into a page, a
passage, a long sentence, a phrase, a word, a sound.

The Films Pynchon is sizzling through his projector includes films by
Fritz Lang, including, of course, his M, his first Sound Film.

A group of children are playing an elimination game in the courtyard
of an apartment building in Berlin[5] using a chant about a murderer
of children. A woman sets the table for dinner, waiting for her
daughter to come home from school. A wanted poster warns of a serial
killer preying on children, as anxious parents wait outside a school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_(1931_film)

M reminds us that Lang's Metropolis and some of his other films are
also in use by Pynchon here.

When the film made it to America Hel was...somehow...too obvious?

Moloch!





On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 7:24 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> His job as an apprentice pirate is to slog through the dreams of the few "mentally healthy leaders” and perhaps the mentally healthy readers and.. “historical figures”, I mean, who isn’t?”... “to cup and bleed them of excess anxiety”,... ”“to get their erections for them, at the oncome of thoughts the doctors feel are inappropriate”...“Suffering what they ought to be themselves—” Somebody’s got to do it.  Pirate  struts. W.C.Fields head is now the “knob” on his “magic” “stick”. And when did this wonderful passive skill so needed by the empire fully arrive?           That tramp, that leering drooling derelict interrupts the tender ruminations of Pirate's genital brain with one of the prizes in last night’s game show competition. And behind this curtain—“your sound will be the sizzling night”.
>
> This does not quite feel like a night at the Copa Cabana but hey, an "“orgy held by a Messiah no one has quite recognized yet,” is just around the corner, and the adenoid from the war of the worlds. Which war?
>
>  You know the one with Sex and Death,   from banana breakfasts  to "horrid blacks", and sizzling nights on trains dark as unlit black velvet and shards of falling….. sharp …pointed...
> Once again I put forth the thought that Pirate like others to come is dream-spying Slothrop, the man with the magic knob pointed toward the future. Whose fears so closely match our handyman with the magic  Mossmoonian codes.
>
> Which War? "You can’t run a war on Gusts of Emotion”. You need control, a cool ease with death, a dance in your step,  a Firm batman’s grip on the wheel of your Lagonda, a keen clarity about who and where the dark angels are.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> On Mar 24, 2016, at 9:04 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Sure. And that poor derelict, that tramp whose fantasy, not the fantasy of a clergyman or some other middle aged man of means, but of a leering  derelict, his, only his fantasy, not there on the film, but only in his mind, and only in Pirate's and Your's Dear Reader because it's someone else's. That sizzling sound is bacon.
>>
>>
>> http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/02/12/graham_greene_and_shirley_temple_what_to_make_of_the_novelist_s_sexual_review.html
>>
>>
>> On Thursday, March 24, 2016, Gary Webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> To overplay my hand here, Ish your analysis reminds me of Graham Greene's review of Wee Willie Winkie (1937)...
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> > On Mar 24, 2016, at 6:49 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > One things for sure, it's not Aqualung's
>> >
>> >> On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 6:47 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> I mention the tramp because he is the one who utters the phrase that
>> >> has been identified here as so puzzling after decades of reading and
>> >> re-reading it. Not saying it is easy to solve or even possible but I
>> >> am suggesting that a closer examination of the passage might prove
>> >> fruitful. So what to make of the first encounter Pirate has with a
>> >> person whose fantasy he has, and what to make of the person, the
>> >> derelict, the tramp?
>> >>
>> >> Why does he cause Pirate to threaten him with the police?
>> >> What is it this buttonless tramp does exactly?
>> >> Lusts after girl's bottoms?
>> >> Is that it?
>> >> Not much of a crime.
>> >> Is Pirate afraid to admit, to succumb to his own lust for little girls?
>> >> Does he share the derelict's fantasy, not because of his gift, the one
>> >> the Firm is so keen to harness, or does he just lust after nymphets?
>> >> Does the tramp call him out on it?
>> >> A hot night for Pirate, the sizzling panties?
>> >> Maybe it turn out to be someone else's fantasy. Maybe it's the Readers.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>> On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 5:05 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>> What to make of the tramp?
>> >>>
>> >>>> On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 2:53 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>>> Lot of nights in BtZ that could be described as sizzling. Fires in night
>> >>>> skies. Slothrop's Hotel Fire (29).
>> >>>>
>> >>>> pp. 41-42: "They have drawn near a glow over the rooftops[...] Heat beats at
>> >>>> their faces, eye-searing yellow when the streams shoot into the fire. A
>> >>>> ladder hooked to the edge of the roof sways in the violent drafts. Up top,
>> >>>> against the sky, figures in slickers brace, wave arms, move together to pass
>> >>>> orders[...] Once Roger and Jessica might have stopped. But they're both
>> >>>> alumni of the Battle of Britain, both have been drafted into the early black
>> >>>> mornings and the crying for mercy, the dumb inertia of cobbles and beams,
>> >>>> the profound shortage of mercy in those days...."
>> >>>>
>> >>>> The sensitive flame at Snoxall's, which is on my mind when I hear about
>> >>>> Gusts of Emotion.
>> >>>>
>> >>>>> On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 9:41 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> Could be referencing burning flesh, I guess, but since sizzling night
>> >>>>> is what the tramp says, not sizzling meat or flesh, metaphorically he
>> >>>>> seems to be describing a sound, a sound that is Yours drear reader and
>> >>>>> Pirate's and whomever the pederastic fantasy actually belongs to,
>> >>>>> and given the naughty sexual context, and mention of the Genital Brain
>> >>>>> above it, I read it as a very very hot night with sizzling orgasmic
>> >>>>> sound. Unless of course the film is silent and it's all theatre.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> There are any number of characters who might dream of little girls
>> >>>>> bent over a fountain.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> Aqualung isn't one of them.
>> >>>>> -
>> >>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> > -
>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
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