mindful pleasures , rainbows, gravity
Monte Davis
montedavis49 at gmail.com
Fri Sep 1 14:42:38 CDT 2017
Yes, e.g. the first stage of the Saturn V for Apollo burned kerosene +
liquid oxygen.
On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 1:32 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> Good point. But I still like my thesis espite that sizeable dent. At
> the time of the writing weren’t there kerosene derived fuels that made the
> orange flames?
>
> > On Sep 1, 2017, at 12:25 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Remember the drinking of fuel in the Mittelwerke, and the mention of the
> SS harvesting potatoes for fermentation and distillation (a la vodka) into
> fuel? The A4/V-2 was propelled by 75% ethanol (ethyl alcohol) and liquid
> oxygen, neither from or derived from oil or gas or anything else
> underground or "fossil."
> >
> > Other than that, agreement abounds.
> >
> > On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 12:04 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> > I love this thread title and want to come back to it and also to the
> final title of Pynchon’s masterwork - Gravity’s Rainbow. In my own
> approach to Pynchon’s body of work I see 4 Masterworks- GR, M&D and ATD
> and V. These all take on major aspects of American History and myth within
> the larger context of western history and myth and open up vistas into non
> western thought: Pythagoras ( one of several paths not taken), Tibetan,
> Chinese, Shamanic, Japanese.
> >
> > The shorter works all seem to take on critical cultural turning points
> occurring within P’s life often with a detective/investigative structure:
> rise of Nixon, Reagan, police authoritarianism…transition to paper money
> and banker/oligarchy economic debt supremacy over labor/ real goods base…
> great failure and lesser successes of 60s cultural revolution…. 9/11
> revival of authoritaian militarism. All of these have a powerful but
> usually understated subtext of wars and war paradigms: Vietnam and war
> with communism… Internal war against nonconformity, against the antiwar
> movement, against organized labor, and against actual human freedom as
> opposed to theoretical patriotic freedom… war on terror .
> >
> > I want to concede to Mark K that the evidence that Mindless Pleasures
> was more than a working title seems persuasive. I have not studied P’s life
> as others have and have read less of the body of Pynchon criticism,
> preferring to rely on my own thoughts and research and interaction with the
> list. This seems to have advantages and disadvantages.
> >
> > BUT…… Gravity’s Rainbow is a better title. I rarely make this kind of
> absolute comparitive judgement and wonder if anyone prefers Mindless
> Pleasures? Why do I think it’s a better Title and why did Pynchon use it
> and does all this have any relation to the labor issues which I am
> persuaded by Ish, after some discussion, is a more central theme of P’s
> work than I had really focused on.
> >
> > Mindless Pleasures is awkwardly misleading and general. The book is not
> about mindless pleasures and the phrase is not that useful a phrase even
> as a satiric induction to deeper thought. It would have swallowed a lot of
> response time to the novel with little benefit.
> >
> > Gravity’s Rainbow is almost the opposite- poetic and unique, not
> obvious, general, or loaded with cultural baggage. It draws you in and
> forces you to deal with the specifictity and metaphoric suggestion of
> language. It is also multi-valent which is one of the consistent qualities
> of P’s literary genius; It can refer to a natural rainbow or one of many
> human-made rainbows which are thematic. Gravity is one of the great
> mysteries of science remaining a challenge after Einstein. It refers to
> death but also implies the complementary life force and birth, the rise and
> fall of a rocket( or the rise and fall of a civilization, a life, all life,
> the force that shapes stars, planets, bends the path of light.. )
> >
> > One of my few original thoughts on the title is the idea of a reference
> to oil/rocket fuel/ coal tar extracts - in short fossil fuels which are
> the accumulated remains of organic life under the pressures of time and
> gravity. For me this gave a broader scope than the traditional reference to
> the rocket's arc. In GR we are looking at the 2nd of 2 world wars driven
> by and attempting to control fossil fuels as the energy source of modern
> civilization and culminating in the delivery of atomic weapons via the
> mastery of fossil fuel powered flight. We see gravity’s rainbows in IG
> Farben’s dyes derived from coal tars, in color coded maps, in chemical
> candies, in rocket trails at dawn, in the actual rainbow that marks the
> restoration of nature and transcendent disapearance of Slothrop. This
> rainbow spectrum is set a against the black and white movie tone of the war
> which dominates the book- a spectrum emphasized by White Visitation,
> Schwarzcommandos, race war references, and the black and white movies it
> refers to, perhaps even to some degree by black print on a white page.
> >
> > Is it possibe that we are being asked to observe and consider a mindful
> choice between the powerful and useful role of binary thinking in human
> history and the promise and potential of something more akin to the octaval
> range of the periodic table, the light spectrum, the musical scale. Is
> evolution, or perhaps the mindful organization of the universe( must these
> 2 ways of thinking be arranged as an opposition?) fundamentally wedded to
> an expansion of consciousness, or is that just a carbon life form bias? It
> is my sense that humans have expanded their cosciousness into tools, into
> language, and via thes into larger dimensions of time and space, but have
> failed to transcend a primitive addiction to the war paradigm. How long
> can we sit on the DNA fence organizing everything around an agonistic
> internal binary war without blowing everything back to silky black goo?-
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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