Not Pynchon just paranoia

Tue May 9 14:23:20 CDT 2017

>From its earliest days the online Pynchonsphere has hosted a sporadic
dialogue between what I think of as the Illuminatus! - PK Dick school, for
whom Pynchon's work is full of coded alerts about real conspiracies... and
the school of (e.g.) David Auerbach, from that other current thread on
paranoia: "*Bleeding Edge* succeeds not because conspiracy theories are
back in vogue, but because Mr. Pynchon has always been writing about WHY WE
CONSTRUCT conspiracy theories." (emphasis mine). See also Herman &
Weisenburger's GR: Domination and Freedom, or Cowart's Thomas Pynchon & the
Dark Passages of History.

In Gravity's Rainbow, for instance, do you take the many passages about
WWII as "celebration of markets," about IG Farben/Shell collaboration after
1939, etc., as evidence of Pynchon's conviction that it *was* all a charade
staged by multinational capitalism?

Or is it Pynchon's descant on 1945's near past: the inter-war sentiment in
UK, France, and US that arms manufacturers, "merchants of death," had been
WWI's only winners and perhaps its instigators...

And 1945's near future: Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," which
lets us voters off the hook just as 40 years of the "Operation Paperclip
Exposed at Last!" narrative lets us off the hook. Is one inevitable
reaction to a war full of *actual* secret, deadly plans to suspect that
there might be one Plan to rule them all?

Closer to Pro Pynchon Studies, you can see both at once in Charles
Hollander's "Pynchon, JFK and the CIA": "To study *Lot 49 *is to decrypt
Pynchon’s encoded messages...  we find *Lot 49 *to be Pynchon’s encrypted
meditation on the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy." I
think Hollander is often brilliant, in that article not so much... and lean
by temperament to the Auerbach school. (Of course, that's what They would
want me to do.)

The dialogue will continue, often as not a dialogue of the deaf. But as
always with Pynchon, that's perfectly appropriate to the present.

On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 8:11 AM, Allan Balliett <allan.balliett at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I truly wish I could believe that all the old CIA documentation was made
> public but, of course, that's a foolish wish. What's bothering me most
> right now is a podcast I heard this weekend from THE LIMINALIST
> http://auticulture.com/liminalist-111-tool-tyrants-jan-irvin/
>
> This gist of which was that the entire Youth Culture of the 60's was
> socially engineered by the CIA and their worldwide cohorts. It goes on to
> say that not only the Beats (who is it that could actually believe that
> Burroughs was NOT a double agent?) but the very Beatles themselves were
> witting tools of a CIA masterminded social program. To believe for one
> moment that the music and poetry of my youth was actually funded and
> created by think tanks created by my grandfather's generation is really too
> much to bear. (It's gets worse, he asserts that the whole 'ethneogen'
> movement, past and present, has been manufactured and spun to the benefit
> of THEM.)
>
> Podcast description from the home page:
>
> Conversation with Jan Irvin on what’s in a name and suggestogens, the John
>> Allegro attacks, Wasson & CIA, overturning the entire field of ethnobotany,
>> Peter Levenda & Trine Day as disinformation peddlers, being surrounded by
>> dissemblers, a circle jerk of citations, from psychedelics to entheogens,
>> mind-manifestations, recreating the fall of man, gnosis as ego inflation,
>> the Trivium, Terence McKenna & MKULTRA, sixty years of CIA rock music,
>> Aztec hippies, psychedelics and blood sacrifice, Jan’s Empowerment rule #
>> 6, the CIA’s road to hell, a conversation between Aldous Huxley & Timothy
>> Leary, reverse-engineered society, the Internal Affairs of Alt Media, the
>> classical Trivium, the tool of tyrants, Daniel Pinchbeck’s connections,
>> spiritual gurus for the CIA, channeling Uranus, how Jan weeds out the
>> witting agents from the willful dupes.
>
>
> It is stated in the show notes that it has been long known that 'students
> of the music hall movement' (there should be special punctuation for
> indicating that you are copying from your own possibly faulty memory)
> "opened doors,' etc, for the Beatles to become the success that they did.
>
> No doubt.
>
> -Allan in WV  where we don't care if it's brainwashing, just put Revolver
> on one more time
>
>
> On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 5:02 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> *Open Culture (@openculture
>> <https://twitter.com/openculture?refsrc=email&s=11>)*
>>
>> 5/9/17, 2:37 AM
>> <https://twitter.com/openculture/status/861832444118417408?refsrc=email&s=11>
>> 12 Million Declassified CIA Documents Now Free Online: Secret Tunnels,
>> UFOs, Psychic Experiments & More bit.ly/2k9byPP <https://t.co/JCapGvAj1w>
>> pic.twitter.com/IyNKxieYhp <https://t.co/IyNKxieYhp>
>>
>> Download <https://twitter.com/download?ref_src=MailTweet-iOS> the
>> Twitter app
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>
>
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