BtZ42 - The Book

Mon May 16 15:08:29 CDT 2016

There were ... whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of
all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which
circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a
title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as The Book".

http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/fascism/english/e_fasco

On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 6:14 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 trues 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
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l