BtZ42 Section 9 (pp 53-60): the Antipointsman

[ish mailian]

G Mikhail Bakhtin has been useful to some.
Speaking of swan lake, Pavlov, Russian and German
folk lore, legend and romance.

On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 9:14 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> In Pynchon scholar Martin Eve's Pynchon & Philosophy, which I am browsing
> in, he, too, focuses on
> Frankenstein's realism with irreal actions.....and analogizes to Pynchon (of
> GR at least). .....
> And, of course, Fowler reads the whole novel within the Gothic tradition as
> do others.
>
>
>
> On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 8:36 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> his chapter turns to how, in the early 18th century, Gothic fiction
>> moved away from the ‘explained supernatural’ and ‘accepted
>> supernatural’ of the earlier Gothic of Walpole, Reeve, Radcliffe, and
>> Lewis towards the use of pseudo-scientific explanation which still
>> leaves room for doubt and fear. Tales such as Frankensteinintroduce
>> and maintain the fantastic in such a way that the strange and
>> disturbing events of the narratives cannot be explained with any
>> certainty as having either supernatural or natural causes. Combining
>> supposedly scientific discourse with the marvellous and uncanny in
>> first-person narrations, such texts present us with extreme states of
>> consciousness which could be taken for either paranoid delusion or
>> demonic possession. Because Frankenstein utilizes the fantastic in
>> this way and also tends towards prose realism, it represents a new
>> development in, and revitalization of, the Gothic, while demonstrating
>> the continuing reliance of the genre on folk-tales, ballads, legends,
>> and myths for its effects.
>>
>>
>> http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119920.001.0001/acprof-9780198119920-chapter-7
>>
>> On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 8:35 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Look, for example, at Victor's account of how he assembles and
>> > animates his creature. He must, of course, be a little vague about the
>> > details, but we're left with a procedure that seems to include
>> > surgery, electricity (though nothing like Whale's galvanic
>> > extravaganzas), chemistry, even, from dark hints about Paracelsus and
>> > Albertus Magnus, the still recently discredited form of magic known as
>> > alchemy. What is clear, though, despite the commonly depicted Bolt
>> > Through the Neck, is that neither the method nor the creature that
>> > results is mechanical.
>> >
>> > https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html
>> >
>> > On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 9:14 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >> Another great post, Monte, imho. Shows TRP with another use of
>> >> either-or, no
>> >> excluded middle and therefore of
>> >> the scientific understanding and attempt at control as ...also a
>> >> metaphor.
>> >>
>> >> On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 9:00 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> pp. 53-54 (Viking pagination)
>> >>> Notice the slide from Jessica's narrative present through a recalled
>> >>> conversation ("Roger has tried to explain...") to The White Visitation
>> >>> ("his
>> >>> little bureau"). He's the one-man Statistics Office.
>> >>>
>> >>> "576 squares" implies a 24x24 grid of squares half a kilometer on a
>> >>> side.
>> >>> So Roger's sampling area is 12 km (~7.5 miles) on a side, 56 sq mi --
>> >>> about
>> >>> a tenth of Greater London's built-up area. If it's centered at Charing
>> >>> Cross, then very roughly from Kensington east to Greenwich, and from
>> >>> Hampstead Heath south to Streatham Common. (UK readers please correct
>> >>> me if
>> >>> I've screwed up my map-gazing.)
>> >>>
>> >>> "An Erlenmeyer flask bubbles..." and we get a slow pan around the
>> >>> room,
>> >>> Roger's split soul captured in a book and a snapshot, as "the graying
>> >>> Pavlovian, thin as a needle" (heh) looks in from the hall.
>> >>>
>> >>> Zeros and ones: "Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, [Pointsman]
>> >>> imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off
>> >>> elements....
>> >>> each point is allowed only the two states: waking or sleep... all
>> >>> Pavlovian
>> >>> brain mechanics assumes the presence of these bi-stable points."
>> >>>
>> >>> In 1944, neurologists knew that neurons had an all-or-nothing
>> >>> threshold
>> >>> for "firing." But they had few details on how adjacent neurons
>> >>> connected,
>> >>> how many connections went to remote cells instead, or how many went
>> >>> down
>> >>> into deeper cortical layers rather than across the surface. They
>> >>> wouldn't
>> >>> understand the electrochemistry of the nerve impulse itself for
>> >>> another
>> >>> decade. So this flickering "mosaic," with its seductive similarity to
>> >>> binary
>> >>> circuit elements and digital computing, is an extremely stylized
>> >>> model.
>> >>>
>> >>> “Summation,” “transition,” “irradiation,” “concentration,” “reciprocal
>> >>> induction”... were not observed phenomena, but Pavlov's *inferred*
>> >>> building
>> >>> blocks for the more complex brain functions he was interested in. They
>> >>> all
>> >>> vanished from neuroscience in the 1950s and 1960s. The all-or-nothing
>> >>> view
>> >>> of neuronal activity has changed, too. While the threshold is real, it
>> >>> can
>> >>> slide up and down with the neuron's recent activity and with
>> >>> neurochemicals
>> >>> swirling around the cells -- both very different from the simple,
>> >>> fixed
>> >>> determinism of switches, relays or transistors.
>> >>>
>> >>> Bottom line: what P wrote in GR about, e.g., V-2 guidance was actual
>> >>> engineering that had been built and had worked. What he wrote about
>> >>> Pointsman's neuroscience was less "modern science" as of the date of
>> >>> writing
>> >>> than it was akin to the Magnetick Hi-Jinks in Mason & Dixon, or
>> >>> Aetherism in
>> >>> Against the Day. And he knew it.
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
>
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l