2 notes section 9; 2 notes section 10

[John Bailey]

Bill Callahan (aka Smog)'s song Truth Serum has always felt to me
resonant with the P-list. Good for a long autumn walk or a quiet
corner somewhen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydfwm84FoNo

On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 8:41 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> love the learning.
>  It does seem that sodium amytal might still be being used in some ways.
> There are a number of books, including a major textbook (and more than one)
> revised in 2015 that still have major entires about the drug. These could be
> for historical thoroughness only, of course, can't tell for sure but none of
> the snippet entries mention out of use BUT other books also mention sodium
> amytal, including that recent book brought to the Plist's attention by Mr.
> Joseph Tracy, The Master and his Emissary. His entry--google books snippet
> to follow--seems to speak of it as it is currently thought of and implies
> recent or current use I would say.
>
> Now used as a sedative mostly. Can put one brain hemisphere to sleep at a
> time evidently. Textbook entries can stress the four results of use as a
> 'truth serum' including false positives, that is false confessions. Known
> way back when. Brain results
> can also be like the brain results of taking LSD, it seems.
>
> https://books.google.com/books?id=t5LZoMJfJuAC&pg=PA34&dq=Is+sodium+Amytal+still+in+use?&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi5043St-3MAhXGbj4KHR27AA44RhDoAQgsMAM#v=onepage&q=Is%20sodium%20Amytal%20still%20in%20use%3F&f=false
>
>
>
> On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 5:40 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>
>>
>> > If there really is a truth drug, would we want it? <
>>
>> I just read the Wikipedia articles on Amobarbital (sodium amytal) and,
>> interestingly enough, the German one says that Amobarbital is still used by
>> the police in several countries as a truth serum to investigate crimes. The
>> given example is the USA.
>>
>> > Amobarbital wurde und wird auch heute noch in verschiedenen Ländern, u.
>> > a. den USA als Wahrheitsserum zur Klärung von Verbrechen eingesetzt.
>> > [Emphasis added]<
>>
>> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amobarbital
>>
>> Not only because the English equivalent, though it's much longer and more
>> detailed, does not mention such a current use in crime investigation, it's
>> hard to believe for me that this is really taking place in the USA of today.
>>
>> Anyone?
>>
>>
>> On 21.05.2016 20:18, Joseph Tracy wrote:
>>
>> Section 9
>> pg 48  I am reading Robert Graves white Goddess; don’t quite know why
>> apart from a returning interest in the decimated remains of pre Christian
>> cultures of the British isles. (White Goddess is very dense,  a steady
>> stream of literary , mythological, alphabetic probings, guesswork, built
>> from the handful of oldest texts.)
>>
>> All that to say that the opening lines from Jessica’s dream is very
>> reminiscent of the language in these ancient Brythonic poems. They often
>> involve journeys to cities or castles with names like the Glass Fortress or
>> Fairy Fortess. So she sees something stalking throught the city of smoke,
>> gathering children, who wail with “dollful”, not doleful, and piteous cries.
>> I remember one line, I think from the spoils of Anuwyn,” doleful to the day
>> of doom”.  She is also a smoker who has a bunch of dolls. I think this
>> language is partly showing a side of her that connects her to myth and her
>> own maternal instincts. She rises to tidy Roger’s strewn clothes.  Like her
>> first dart to the bull’s eye, there is something about Jessica SwanLake that
>> hits the mark, sees things others miss. Some  listers see her as a predator,
>> but I think that is oversimplified; she is looking for safety, a panda (or
>> maybe a baby) to name Michael. Michael, the  invincible warrior angel who
>> battles with ev
>>
>>
>>
>> il.
>>
>> pg. 60 Couldn’t they be children again dreaming of Christmas as holy
>> comfort, not sheep on the bare hills under the Star’s awful radiance.
>>
>>  Again the maternal instinct that these abandoned houses can again be safe
>> homes. There is a clear trans-temporal reference to the The Atomic weapon
>> that has replaced God, the random destruction that has replaced dreams and
>> beliefs. In this chapter we see most acutely and sympathetically the inner
>> struggle of many of Pynchon’s women between men who represent the myth and
>> practicality of safety though strength and enduring beliefs, and that
>> individual who follows his own song lines but probaly loves her in a way
>> that is its own mythos made real, not image, not comforting, not the stuff
>> of dreams, but 2 made 1.      (This choice is both personal and  a social
>> choice that obviously continues to play out in powerful ways. Is it
>> allegory? Can one employ alegorical implications without the work becoming
>> allegory? Is there something true in allegory? Faust may be allegory but
>> isn’t it also deeply true? It seems to me to have to do with the credibility
>> of the individual humans.  )
>>
>> Section 10
>> pg. 61 The return address tells us we are in St. Veronica’s again. This
>> implies to me that Dr. Spectro was playing Pointsman in section 8 ,
>> disapproving of PP2’s proposed research not from research ethics, as he
>> said,  but because he wanted Slothrop to himself.  Wanted to use his drugs,
>> his mind probes, though it is hard to see what he is learning, if there is
>> anything happening under his supervision beside the dredging up of painful,
>> “dollful" and piteous cries. Is he purging pain or just recycling it?   Even
>> here the slippery Slothrop finds a route of evasion, escapes the rapacious
>> assault on his inner life by diving so deep into the subconscious there is
>> little for Spectro to see but dingleberries and a crossword puzzle composed
>> entirely of a single phrase.  This Kenosha Kid trope  is Foucaltian
>> linguistics as the insurmountable barrier to perfect systems of control, to
>> AI, to spying as a means to accurate information.  It’s  not just the monkey
>> wrench in the system, it’
>>
>>
>>
>> s the shape shifting  monkey in the monkey wrech.
>>
>> If there really is a truth drug, would we want it?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
>>
>>
>>
>
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l