mindful pleasures , rainbows, gravity

[ish mailian]

So what is the dent in the thesis?
I bet we can bang it out.

On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 3:52 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings, and agreement: coal and oil and veins of metal all yearn to
> be part of the System, part of the war (as in the oil-derived Imipolex
> plastic if rteh Schwarzgerat). As Rathenau tells the seance:
>
> "Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of
> original waste over greater and greater masses of city. Structurally,
> they are strongest in compression.... The persistence, then, of
> structures favoring death. Death converted into more death. Perfecting
> its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and overlaid with
> more strata—epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is
> the sign of Death the impersonator."
>
> Ir later, Blobadjian escaping the "Arabists": "It is a period now in
> Baku of lull, of retrenchment. All the oil money taken out of these
> fields by the No-bels has gone into Nobel Prizes. New wells are going
> down elsewhere, between the Volga and the Urals. Time for
> retrospection here, for refining the recent history that’s being
> pumped up fetid and black from other strata of Earth’s mind . . . ."
>
> On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 3:21 PM, Genevieve Dufour Allen
> <genevievej.da at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Long-time lurker: first reply-all: greetings!
>>
>> I don't wish to dismiss the connection to fossil fuels out of hand entirely.
>> While the V-2/A-4 were indeed fueled by ethanol and O2, there was still an
>> integral part supplied by petroleum byproducts (plastics), particularly in
>> relation to 00000: Imipolex G. IG, ICI, and AG had connections to Shell,
>> Dutch Shell, and Shell Mex House in the patent and production of Imipolex,
>> including a certain test firing of a propulsion system related to Imipolex
>> from the roof of a Dutch Shell office. This comes up when Slothrop has found
>> the papers detailing Jamf's work for Psychochemie AG.
>>
>> Crude oil and the extraction industry are treated more subtly in GR, but
>> it's there. The rainbow that is always reflected in the slippery black gold
>> that is now infused in nearly every aspect of the modern world was not
>> something that was passed by. So not fueling the rockets, but still involved
>> in nearly every weapon and transportation in some manner.
>>
>> There is another part I can't quite remember/find that was a beautiful
>> sentence about ancient fossils below the ground being disturbed or
>> fractured, in GR.
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 12:32 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
>>
>>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l