Tangentially Pynchon. see today's Google Doodle

[Mark Kohut]

OK...I apologize for going on after my simple post yesterday....I did not
think it was so contestable.
as this wiki entry sez, as is true of most major words describing ideas,
'There are many meanings to
anarchism and not all of them are mutually exclusive"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism

In yesterday's Google Doodle article and in many summary presentations of
Ms Jacobs' notions,
the phrase 'street ballet" from her (or about her vision, don't know) is
used as the positive vision she
argued for deeply re the ineradicable human quality she believed necessary
for right city life.

Knowing her work far less than Morris, that phrase and concept came to
remind me later of, among other things,
the anarchist's dance scene in Lot 49, under the bridge, everyone not
bumping, a self-organizing dance/ballet
that is part of TRP's vision, his hopeful vision. Then there is the anarchy
theme in Against the Day.

When I would walk NY streets, including the Village or visit Washington
Square or Union Square parks and see
1) chess hustlers playing 2) skateboarders 3) walkers 4) runners 5) simple
stretchers and exercisers 6) sunbathers
sunning 6) couples holding hands 7) couples canoodling 8) little picnics 9)
readers sitting 10) kids playing marbles
and more ....I would lightly marvel at how it all happened on its own,
self-organized, little or no bumping, so to say,  later coming to see
it under the label of a kind of social anarchy good.

My attempt yesterday to link Jacobs 'street ballet' to a Pynchon's notion
of anarchy was just a speculative attempt
to point out that he lived in the Village when Jane was an activist with
her 'radical' notions; he was around when her
first book was published......I have asked myself and haven't found it in
the scholars of TRP I've read where TRP's notions
re anarchism might have come from....theorists like Kropotkin and
Herzen---we know he went to see Stoppard's play
on all these Russians decades later so there is them as a possible
influence but I have also wondered about
such as New Yorkers Goodman and Jacobs....



On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 7:48 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Oh! I finally got the joke!
> Wherein the P-list debates the definition of anarchy.
> I'm with Joseph.
> But what we really need is a someone who can authorise which
> definition is correct.
>
>
> On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 9:02 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> > To my thinking this is semantic. If by anarchic we mean mean an
> organizational tendency from less to no central authority or command, then
> Mark and other writers are using the term reasonably. If one means a
> political ideology with no executive decision makers and a committment to
> removing those in authority, then you win...
> >> On May 4, 2016, at 5:13 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> To champion grass-roots  social-based urbanism (championing "urban
> villages," essentially) as opposed to the modernist urban renewal ideals of
> her time, doesn't make her in any way anarchistic.  She was opposed to
> Modernism's ideals for urbanism.  It has now long been recognized that her
> concepts of an organic people-oriented urbanism is much more livable than
> what she opposed.  Essentially she was pointing out that the ghettos that
> were being torn down were much more livable that the Pruitt-Igoe style
> urbanism that was being proposed to replace it.  She was right.  Labeling
> that stance as "anarchism" is silly and misses the main ideas she promoted.
> >>
> >> This (Pruitt-Igoe) is what she opposed:
> >>
> >>
> http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/22/pruitt-igoe-high-rise-urban-america-history-cities
> >>
> >> And the earlier city which surrounds the project (which was not the
> product of anarchy in any meaningful sense - except as opposed to
> Pruitt-Igoe)  in the photo is what she championed.
> >>
> >> David Morris
> >>
> >> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 3:48 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> David,
> >>
> >> There is a deep strain of human-sized, freedom-embracing, non-top-down,
> self-organizing activities which
> >> have been written about even here as 'anarchism'. See the anarchist
> dance in Lot 49.
> >>
> >> Jacob's vision of city life has been seen under these concepts by many
> for a long time: Here is the estimable
> >> Richard Sennet for one: As Jane Jacobs points out, high concentration
> of dwelling units per acre and high land coverage are essential to the ...
> 1969), and the appreciative review by Richard Sennett, “The Anarchism of
> Jane Jacobs,” New York Review of Books ...
> >>
> >> There are scores more which I am not hunting down. it is her vision of
> urban living, and parts of mumford's which might relate
> >> them to Pynchon and are what I was referring to.
> >>
> >> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 4:12 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> Jane Jacobs was in no way connected to anarchism, but, like Mumford,
> she was a proponent of urban living, as are most architects just about
> anywhere...
> >>
> >> David Morris
> >>
> >> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 2:32 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> about urban theorist Jane Jacobs. Read up and see that
> >> she shared many notions with Lewis Mumford, discussed a lot
> >> here on the List. Her ideas of a vibrant diverse 'anarchic' street
> >> and storefront life might dovetail with many of P's meanings of
> anarchic goodness.
> >>
> >> Remember that she lived in Greenwich Village, near Barthelme (therefore
> >> Pynchon) I believe and Grace Paley and her husband
> >> most of the time TRP was supposed to have
> >> lived there. I think.
> >>
> >> Everything connects.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160505/baaa16cf/attachment.html>