Zoyd's Dress

[jody boy]

 "More is Less"... You remember, the store in Vineland? Where Zoyd
bought his dress? Follow the bouncing check. It's "in the Mayo," or,
back in The Day, a more nearly deadly bounce, while checking out a
whole mayonnaise factory with a real, silicon-based, "window" and
uncertain
escape. There's no point, or "collapse of the meaning-function" I'm
trying to make here, just the feeling that the future is indeterminate
in any specific way- and that future debts may, or may not, reflect
the price of present conveniences. In other words, the future emerges,
somehow, without regard for the politics of the past or present beyond
anyone's control, and often with surprising results- Like Uncle
Zoyd not figuring on the "Log Jam" having been transformed into a
trendy gay bar where his new dress- designed, he thought, to add to
his
"psycho" persona- sends out signals of an entirely different nature.
Who, excepting Monty Python, could have predicted these new-style
lumbar jacks...

There is also, I think, in this scene from Vineland, besides the
themes of burnt-out sixty's excess and media inspired
hyper-consumption,
echoes of Moore's Law, regarding the limits of silicon based control
of information processing. That, and the Orwellian conjugations of
opposites: Love is Hate, Freedom is Slavery, etc. Vineland is set in
1984, after all. But there is, um, more than meets the eye to this
sartorial set-piece; even echoes that, to my ear, have an uncanny
resonance with today's events. For me, Vineland more than the rest of
the oeuvre captures the tenor of today's times- and even offers a
glimmer of hope for the future- or at least, of catching the top brass
flat-footed.

Ok, it's just a novel, but its slyly low-key tubal flickerings hint at
future amplifications that mirror what has actually transpired
on many different levels in the "real" world, often in resounding and
surprising ways. How, for example, could anyone have predicted that
the transistor radio in my hand on the beach at Seaside, N.J., in the
mid-sixties, blaring disc jock "Cousin' Brucey" on WABC AM radio,
would
morph into a Smart Phone- with the ability to cut/paste/sample/share
and talk back to Cousin Brucey's radio progeny, or even provide
live feed of the waves rollin' in- (while sittin' on the dock of
Ebay?) or that, joila! the messages of the masses, fake or not,
would become Mainstream News?

As someone once opined (Mr. Toth? Reagan post-nap?... well, probably
just Phillip W. Anderson)- perhaps More is not Less, despite the
solidly sad state of affairs to which our current surfeit of
communicating power has led us into, but simply, "different" than can
ever
be predicted by any rational extension of the given constituencies of
the present. Knowing something "in principle" is not a guarantee
of anything except uncertainty. More information does not necessarily
lead to better (or worse!) predictions, but it does comes with a
price.

Newness emerges with and without regard for cause and effect,
otherwise- despite St. Augustine's surrender against the pitiless
light of
day, there really would be nothing new under the sun. Dressing up the
past to fit preconceived notions of what's right for the future
might just lead to some rather rude updates.

            "I foresee a universal information system (UIS), which
will give everyone access at any given moment to the contents of
            any book that has ever been published or any magazine or
any fact..."  Andrei Sakharov, August 24, 1974.

            "Russian Johnny B. Good"
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l