BtZ42/11 - Kryptosam, Wuotan, Pirate as robot

[János Széky]

As for the last question, I think there is no chronological problem here.
The message ("incoming mail") was written by Katje at Blicero's, arranging
for her escape, when she saw Blicero's game was turning serious, and
delivered in the rocket, which didn't explode (11 V). Pirate reads it, will
be flown in, meet here at the prearranged place, "by the windmill known as
"The Angel" (106 V), and rescue her. The intriguing question is how Katje
was able to put it in the rocket, and how she fixed it so that in wouldn't
explode.

2016-05-28 2:38 GMT+02:00 Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>:

> Holden could do anything (damn, gotta watch 'Network' for the nnth time).
> But from the limited cues P gives us, my Slothrop is plumper and ... well,
> goofier. All kinds of penetrating intelligence swirls around him, but it's
> not his. He 'does' the leading men from the Hollywood movie he's seen, but
> I'm coming to think of him in his own right as more like one of the mid-20s
> frat boy / bros from a Seth Rogen comedy. Maybe a young William Bendix?
>
> On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 6:27 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>> I agree with the freelancing - Pointsman seems to be pretty independent.
>> I'm sure it's been diagrammed somewhere, but as a reader it's hard to
>> figure out the command structure that ties, say, Roger, Pirate and
>> Pointsman together. All pretty obscure and ripe for renegade actions.
>>
>> I don't see Katje being the source of the picture based on Pirate's
>> psychosexual profile. He's never told Scorpia. He's never told anyone.
>> That's the horror of the situation.
>>
>> I'll second your Jack Hawkins as Pirate, but in return, I'm going to have
>> to insist: William Holden ( a young incarnation, anyway) IS Slothrop.
>>
>> LK
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Monte Davis
>> Sent: May 27, 2016 5:36 PM
>> To: kelber
>> Cc: “pynchon-l at waste.org“
>> Subject: Re: BtZ42/11 - Kryptosam, Wuotan, Pirate as robot
>>
>> > Either way, British Intelligence knows all about it.
>>
>> I'd always read it that way before, but as I noted a while back I'm now
>> entertaining at least the possibility that there's some freelancing going
>> on, and/or that "They" are less monolithic than I once thought. Kryptosam
>> was interwar, so by 1944 both sides (and the Dutch resistance) might have
>> it without forcing the inference of "current" top-down cooperation. And
>> given that Pirate has been back and forth into occupied Europe, I'm
>> inclined to give Katje credit for knowing his pleasure points without
>> having seen his dossier.
>>
>> > this episode is misplaced chronologically.
>>
>> Not impossibly so: by Weisenburger's timeline this scene is only the
>> second day after "incoming mail," and might be the first private moment
>> Pirate has had. It's a busybusybusy holiday season! :-)
>>
>> https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/articles/abstract/10.16995/pn.401/
>>
>> BTW, Jack Hawkins has always been my "GR movie of the mind" pick for
>> Pirate. That he started his career in panto is just gravy.
>> http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0370144/
>>
>> On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 1:28 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Episode 11 is one of the shortest (the shortest? I haven't gone through
>>> and counted) in the book.
>>>
>>> Summary: This is the first mention of IG Farben in the book, coupled
>>> with the second mention of Dr. Jamf. We learned in the earlier conversation
>>> between Pointsman and Spectro that Slothrop was previously one of Jamf's
>>> subjects. Now, via a brochure for one of IG Farben's dye products, we get a
>>> view of Jamf's focus - the marriage of the chemical and the psychosexual.
>>> Pirate, his psychosexual profile being accurately pegged by Them, is
>>> quickly able to decode the Kryptosam-inked message. He's being asked to
>>> step in and save an operative from a perilous situation.
>>>
>>> Some specifics:
>>>
>>> The Kryptosam pamphlet is the first explicit mention of the running
>>> theme connecting control, death and sexuality. Kind of an early rendering
>>> of "grab 'em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow." Or
>>> liebestod, Nazi-industrialized. Pirate's orgasm - petit mort - is a
>>> necessary step in a military-industrial process.
>>>
>>> That the hidden Kryptosam ink develops into a "Negro-brown" color seems
>>> an echoing of the Negro/shit paranoia of the Kenosha Kid episode. When we
>>> meet Katje some episodes later, she's wearing a dress in "a rich cocoa
>>> shade known as 'nigger' in this country [Britain]."
>>>
>>> "They hunt the sky like Wuotan and his mad army." Wuotan and his wild
>>> hunt signifying death to those who see it (a folkloric concept most
>>> recently ripped off by Game of Thrones, in the form of the White Walkers).
>>> After the obscurities of the Kenosha Kid, this is a little heavy-handed, no?
>>>
>>> "Pirate's own robot hands…" Pirate, having masturbated on command, has
>>> become a cog in the machine. His sexual kinks mapped with scientific
>>> precision - measured input creates the required output - Pointsman's dream
>>> subject.
>>>
>>> The chilling part of this episode is that it links IG Farben squarely
>>> with British intelligence. The operative - presumably Katje - wrote a
>>> message in Kryptosam. Was it made available to her by the Brits or was it
>>> readily available in Blicero's quarters?  Either way, British Intelligence
>>> knows all about it. In a sense, Kryptosam is the anti-W.A.S.T.E., an
>>> alternate form of communication, not for the preterite, but for Them.
>>>
>>> One final question: Are we to assume that this message was contained in
>>> the cylinder retrieved at the bomb site by Pirate, right after his banana
>>> breakfast? If so, this episode is misplaced chronologically.
>>>
>>> Laura
>>>
>>>
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>
>>
>>
>
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