BtZ42 - The Book

[Mark Kohut]

Maybe I never sent this?

On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 10:19 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just another resonance about it all: Before Dr. Spock's 1945 Baby and
> Child Care book---often in our earlier lifetime referred to as The Book [on
> child-rearing], the leading baby-raising book was Dr. John(?) Watson's.
> Watson a leading behaviorist in America----''never hug your child'. "let
> them cry it out"...etc....
>
> On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 7:25 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I don't think we disagree at all that the "involved social practice"
>> surrounding the Book is more than pointless ornament.
>>
>> I don't think there's any question at all about what book it is.
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 6:12 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
>> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Yet still. Laura's thesis that The Book is "given a mystically ritual
>>> connotation by its rotation among the various personalities of the White
>>> Visitation" seems to be rather confirmed than falsified by the episode
>>> you're quoting from. This social practice respectively context is as
>>> important as the source text itself. There are Pointsman's marginalia, the
>>> mysterious origin of the copy, the secrecy of its use, the occasionally
>>> religious character of the debates - "'Pierre Janet --- sometimes the man
>>> talked like an Oriental mystic. (...)'/'I don't want to get into a
>>> religious debate with you (...), but I wonder ...'" (p. 88) -, plus the
>>> motto of the episode, making fun of authentic sources in general:
>>>
>>> "Better behave yourself or we'll send you back to Dr. Jamf!
>>>
>>> When Jamf conditioned *him*, he threw away the stimulus.
>>>
>>> Looks like Dr. Jamf's been by to see *your* little thing today, hasn't
>>> he?
>>>
>>>      --- *Neil Nosepicker's Book of 50,000 Insults*,
>>>                                 §6.72, 'Awful Offspring,'
>>>                                 The Nayland Smith Press,
>>>                                 Cambridge (Mass.), 1933"
>>>
>>> (p. 83, Picador/Viking)
>>>
>>> And then Pavlov died in 1936, while the action here takes place in 1944.
>>> In the meantime, science, due to the war, started to become big science.
>>> With the rise of the Rocket, and its societal implications
>>> ("Raketenstadt"), the rules of research are changing: Roger "feels the
>>> foundation of that discipline [statistics] trembling, a bit now, deeper
>>> than oddity ought to drive. Odd, odd, odd---think of the word: such white
>>> finality in its closing clap of tongue. It implies moving past the
>>> tongue-stop---beyond the zero---and into the other realm. Of course you
>>> don't move past. But you do realize, intellectually, that's how you
>>> *ought* to be moving." (p. 85). And Ivan Pavlov - "(h)e was realistic
>>> enough not to expect it [the true mechanical explanation] in his lifetime.
>>> Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope was for a long chain of better
>>> and better approximations" (p. 89) - appears, all of sudden, pretty
>>> outmoded in the shining new light of Raketenstadt.
>>>
>>> So yes, Weisenburger is correct in identifying The Book as volume 2 of
>>> Pavlov's lectures on conditioned reflexes. But his characterization of the
>>> involved social practice as "having no particular purpose" and "a bit of
>>> melodrama from the narrator" raises doubts whether he really thought the
>>> issue through. To identify a source is not the same as understanding its
>>> use by the author. And of course, The Book (note the caps!) does also refer
>>> to the Bible. The missing link here is "shit, money, and the Word" (p. 28)
>>> ...
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 27.04.2016 09:21, Monte Davis wrote:
>>>
>>> LK> Is there any textual justification for Weisenburger's explanation
>>> later in the book?
>>>
>>>
>>> pp. 87-88 (Viking):
>>>
>>>
>>> "Pointsman has been talking about paranoia and the “idea of the
>>> opposite.” He has scribbled in The Book exclamation points and *how
>>> true*s all about the margins of Pavlov’s open letter to Janet
>>> concerning the *sentiments d'emprise*, and of Chapter LV, “An Attempt
>>> at a Physiological Interpretation of Obsessions and of Paranoia”—he
>>> can’t help this bit of rudeness, although the agreement among the seven
>>> owners was not to mark up The Book—it was too valuable for that sort of
>>> thing, they’d had to put in a guinea apiece. It was sold him on the sly, in
>>> the dark, during a Luftwaffe raid (most existing copies had been destroyed
>>> in their warehouse early in the Battle of Britain). Pointsman never
>>> even saw the seller’s face, the man vanishing into the hoarse auditory
>>> dawn of the all‑clear, leaving the doctor and The Book, the dumb sheaf
>>> already heating up, moistening in his tight hand . . . yes it might
>>> have been a rare work of erotica, certainly that coarse hand‑set look
>>> to the type . . . the crudities in phrasing, as if Dr. Horsley Gantt’s
>>> odd translation were in cipher, the plaintext listing shameful
>>> delights, criminal transports..."
>>>
>>>
>>> If there's another book combining that letter to Janet, that Chapter LV
>>> title, that translator, and that history of the first printing, I'm all
>>> ears.
>>>
>>> On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 1:09 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Jumping to the end of the section - p. 47:
>>>>
>>>> "Spectro is one of the original seven owners of The Book, and if you
>>>> ask Mr. Pointsman what Book, you'll only get smirked at."
>>>>
>>>> Weisenburger is quick to identify The Book as volume 2 of Pavlov's
>>>> Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes. He adds that the secrecy of rotating the
>>>> book between various owners has no particular purpose, calling it "a bit of
>>>> melodrama from the narrator."
>>>>
>>>> My gut reaction is, fuck off, Weisenburger! Is there any textual
>>>> justification for Weisenburger's explanation later in the book? There's
>>>> certainly none here. It seems way too prosaic and non-Pynchonian an
>>>> interpretation. Have I missed something?
>>>>
>>>> I read The Book as deliberately obscure - an unholy book of
>>>> (perhaps)lab data, meticulously and secretively collected, and given a
>>>> mystically ritual connotation by its rotation among the various
>>>> personalities of the White Visitation.
>>>>
>>>> Laura
>>>> -
>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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