2 notes section 9; 2 notes section 10

[Joseph Tracy]

Yes, the English Wikipedia article I looked at says it is discredited for producing false memories. Obviously Slothrop’s trip down the toilet is not a real memory but there seems to be some possibility that some of it was recounted to the therapist. It does look as though Pynchon is indicating that false memories can be triggered. Fear fantasies seem a likely candidate for something stored in the memory in a powerful form. I also have the feeling that Slothrop went into this on high alert and is resisting, evading,  diving into deep cover.  



> On May 22, 2016, at 5:40 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
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> > If there really is a truth drug, would we want it? <
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> 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. 
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> > Amobarbital wurde und wird auch heute noch in verschiedenen Ländern, u. a. den USA als Wahrheitsserum zur Klärung von Verbrechen eingesetzt. [Emphasis added]<
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> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amobarbital
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> 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. 
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> Anyone?
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> 
> 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.) 
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>> 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
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>> il.
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>> 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. 
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>>  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.  )
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>> 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’
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>> s the shape shifting  monkey in the monkey wrech. 
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>> If there really is a truth drug, would we want it?
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>> Pynchon-l / 
>> http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
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