BtZ42 Section 9 (pp 53-60): the sieve of chance

[Mark Kohut]

from a real fine---New Statesman---review of DeLillo's latest. RE Jessica's
flash vision.

"but Jeffrey finds true depth and intensity in everyday life, in “things
people do, ordinarily, forgettably”. At least that’s what he wants to find
– but “the soporifics of normalcy” make it hard to achieve moments of
communion."

In some interview Nabokov once said, I think---and here I may be an
unreliable rememberer, changing for unconscious reasons---that the hardest
novel to write would be one where two people
met, fell in love, married and lived happily ever after without an
existential crisis or with religion
as part of their lives.

On Sat, May 14, 2016 at 5:56 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> i forgot to add Jessica's flash vision of herself at thirty, [p. 60 Miller
> edition]...that list of a happy settled life's things.
> 'several children', a garden, a window..voices *Mummy, what's...*cucumbers
> and wild onions on a chopping board....
>
> so nice.
>
> On Sat, May 14, 2016 at 5:48 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Roger knows.....the real world probabilities. Roger knows between zero
>> and one. Roger, unlike Frenesi and so many others, is not
>> binary-minded.....Roger knows "the excluded middle".
>>
>> Roger here is Pynchon, that is, Roger here carries (most of) Pynchon's
>> non-satiric concerns, non-satiric good. Roger
>> is the baseline of P's 'vision', his vision of life and war.
>>
>> In this instance, Roger knows the PURE EQUAL CHANCE of a bomb on one's
>> head for anyone. Pynchon gets to
>> say Death this way is democratic-- or better, egalitarian. Pynchon gets
>> to say Death can come at any moment.
>>
>> No one around him---those statistical idiots, all of us--GET this, not
>> even Pointsman and not Jessica, of course.
>>
>> They are not 'safe' in their found safe house. During the war, nowhere is
>> safe.
>>
>> I also see in this chapter, Pynchon presenting us with (part of) his
>> vision of the good life: 'To live in a world where *that [an approaching
>> storm] *would be the excitement." "only kind thunder"---great
>> line...Where one (or two or a family lived) in simple dailiness without
>> fear. This little positive vision appears differently in later books,
>> Vineland and Against the Day mostly; in the latter in P's vision of small
>> village life in Olde Europe before the wars as one place.
>>
>> "Don't you know there's a war on, moron?"
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 11:15 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> >But once it *has* settled...
>>> That's the crux, and a starting point for a fascinating (some other
>>> time) excursus into Bayesian probability. We do much more
>>> anthropomorphizing and projection than we know, and a some level we'll
>>> always feel that the roulette ball has a memory and "knows" it should start
>>> evening things out by settling on red. That feeling grows much faster than
>>> the unlikelihood of any given run of black does -- which is why more
>>> players flocked to make ever larger bets on red, and overall the casino did
>>> very well that night.
>>>
>>> > It would have been the same probability even if the ball at that point
>>> had settled on black for a few million times in a row, no?
>>>
>>> Yes -- aside from the likelihood that you would long since have
>>> concluded the wheel must be rigged :-)
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 9:32 AM, Thomas Eckhardt <
>>> thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>>>
>>>>  Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> P. 56:
>>>>>
>>>>> “But squares that have already* had* several hits, I mean—”
>>>>>
>>>>> “I’m sorry. That’s the Monte Carlo Fallacy..."
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I look at it like this: It is highly unlikely that the roulette ball
>>>> settles on black for 26 times in a row. But once it *has* settled on black
>>>> for 26 times in a row, the probability for it to do so again with the next
>>>> spin of the wheel is the same as before (48.6 per cent, that is).
>>>>
>>>> At least that's how I explain it to the kids...
>>>>
>>>> Where the bettors went wrong was that 26 spins of a roulette wheel
>>>>> simply isn't that large a number.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hmmm. It would have been the same probability even if the ball at that
>>>> point had settled on black for a few million times in a row, no?
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160515/4f8f04e5/attachment.html>