BtZ42/11 - Kryptosam, Wuotan, Pirate as robot

[Mark Kohut]

Simply writing "THEY let him [Pointsman] run it his way" led to thinking of
a dog running, a hound
hounding Slothrop in that fox-hound nexus loop Monte found (w Mike) and
might still be excited by.

On Sun, May 29, 2016 at 7:26 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Re: Command structure. I've always, not trying to work it out granularly
> (yet), seen it as a
> fully-hidden *They* purposely. Reinforced after AtD because analogous.
>  Perhaps as PISCES in that scene?
>
> Pointsman I've seen as being given his head; he is in charge of the
> science investigation, THEY
> let him run it his way; others are made to help him and/or do other things
> (simply report).
>
> 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
>>>
>>
>> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160530/551e7d34/attachment.html>