Zoyd's Dress

[ish mailian]

I like this a lot. Thanks

On Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 9:46 PM, jody boy <jodys.gone2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  "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
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l