Zoyd's Dress

Sat May 13 09:16:27 CDT 2017

http://www.politico.com/magazine/gallery/2015/04/pictures-of-jefferson-davis-dressed-like-a-woman-000141?slide=0

One hundred fifty years ago, Jefferson Davis, the former president of the
Confederacy, was on the run, wanted for treason and suspected complicity in
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In one final sprint to save himself,
Davis slipped on his wife's overcoat to flee advancing authorities, a
choice that would later grow into rumors that at the time of his capture he
was dressed as a woman. Despite the fact that his get-up was not an
intentional disguise, the image of a bonnet- and crinoline-clad Davis
running from the police was too good for northern papers to pass up. A
trend likened by the Wall Street Journal to a “pre-internet meme," a spate
of gleeful, vindictive cartoons of Davis dressed as a woman bloomed on the
publications' editorial pages—later representing the absurd end of one of
the bloodiest chapters in American history. We collected as many as we
could find because, 150 years later, they're still pretty

On Mon, May 1, 2017 at 7:50 PM jody boy <jodys.gone2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> "Fresh"
>
> On Sun, Apr 30, 2017 at 3:24 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I like it too....new, original...
> >
> > 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
> >
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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