PS: A more World-centric guess at other prophetic writers and books.

[Joseph Tracy]

Here is a world-centric quote from a prophetic author that sheds an intersting light on  BE,  on the quote from VL, and on our current cultural  tribalism.

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.
    Marshall McLuhan form the Gutenburg Galaxy.

McLuhan seemed generally  to have tremendous faith in the long term resilience of humans as the species evolved with its technologies. There is a sense that the new technologies that rewire us are better thought of as benignly inevitable toward an expansion and balancing of consciousness than something to be feared and resisted,  but here he makes a pretty ominous reference to Big Brother and he is forecasting  Big Brother in the same technological  way that Pynchon is describing in VL and BE in particular.

> On Sep 3, 2017, at 9:08 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Note that P's title for the Luddite essay is posed as a question. The
> author might have adopted the same strategy here. I don't think P
> attacks the internet, nor is he a self professed Luddite.
> 
> On VL's  prescience, the "The personnel changed, the Repression went
> on, growing wider, deeper, and less visible, regardless of the names
> in power."
> 
> He got that right.
> 
> On Sun, Sep 3, 2017 at 8:40 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> It’s a good article by someone who knows Pynchon better than many reviewers. I am skeptical that P “attacks the internet “ or that he is a self professed Luddite but he defends the premise well. The Luddite essay comes off as far more nuanced in my reading though there is a definite cheers offered to King Lud and the badass resistance.  I do think P is forcing readers to consider the possibility that Technology itself is not inherently neutral as many claim, but inherently risky, requiring restraint and protection of values far more important than the often feeble and unequal  benefits it delivers.
>>  The article is full of insight and I like the courage of the writer to take a stand on Pyhnchon that is not lit crit careful but defensible from what P has written.
>>> On Sep 3, 2017, at 3:20 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I like this piece, "Thomas Pynchon attacks the Internet: The
>>> self-professed Luddite paints a picture of compromises and
>>> disillusionment in  'Bleeding Edge.' "
>>> 
>>> MICHAEL JARVIS, LA REVIEW OF BOOKS
>>> 
>>> at Solon here----------------------------->>>>>
>>> 
>>> http://www.salon.com/2013/09/13/thomas_pynchon_attacks_the_internet_in_new_book_partner/
>>> 
>>> Here, in the contrast of Gibson and Pynchon, Jarvis nails it:
>>> 
>>> "Where Gibson shows the reader how the future is really the
>>> unacknowledged present, Pynchon demonstrates how quickly the present
>>> becomes the unremembered past."
>>> 
>>> On Sun, Sep 3, 2017 at 12:44 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>>> I am having a hard time recalling the outstandingly prophetic aspects of BE. It seems to me seated in the moment of 9/11 and the immediate aftermath with little projection required. Mostly P tweaks the news and the conspiracy questions and uses an accountant to point the readers to the general principal of following the money. I will be interested to hear some specific projections.
>>>> 
>>>> I do like the question about  literature that sees accurately into the future. I like Margaret Atwood the most as someone who sees the implications and possibilituies of scentific, political, economic trends with insight/foresight and logic.   Paulo Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl was impressive. The role of  catastrophic climate and weather in the planet’s future is very hard to predict and he gives it a central role that is already playing out in Bangladesh and maybe the Gulf. All the Birds in the Sky has an interesting version of a network based AI, and poses an important question about the idea of moving off planet and at what cost to those left on earth, which is equallly about the mindset of an elite toward a planet in peril ( has the tone of young adult lit but skillful). The film version of PD James Children of Men had a very powerful projection of the future of refugees. Goethe's Faustus still speaks to me.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Sep 2, 2017, at 7:21 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Kafka. The Man Without Qualities. Broch's The Sleepwalkers, I've often heard said,
>>>>> although this one I've never even looked at.
>>>>> The recently read Hopscotch (more "prophetic' maybe than Marquez, which doesn't mean better necessarily) but I could hardly tell.
>>>>> Back to Shakespeare, maybe The Tempest and Measure for Measure? Sorta.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Sat, Sep 2, 2017 at 6:24 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> their appreciation of BLEEDING EDGE as the world
>>>>> has turned in the direction it has, I was just reminded
>>>>> of a brilliant thematic hint that TRP himself gave us
>>>>> in the trailer to it.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The upper West Side macher in the vimeo
>>>>> describes himself as working 'on the margins' ---like Karl Rove!
>>>>> 
>>>>> To me, this novel is a living example in my lifetime of how
>>>>> an artist penetrated so deeply into our world that though we
>>>>> "got it" and appreciated it when we read it, we have lived since so overtly through the
>>>>> world he foresaw revealing itself that the word "prophetic" must apply.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I'm trying to think of historic literary examples I've heard about.It is NOT like
>>>>> It Can't Happen Here nor even Roth's The Plot Against America in my mind.
>>>>> They are, what, too literal not deep enough although good?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Melville? In a stretch, I know, the way it took a couple of hundred years for
>>>>> Hamlet's depth psychology to be felt and appreciated? Austen even? Poe, in a way?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Anyway, you can stop reading the weaker speculations after the first three paragraphs
>>>>> and just comment on my stronger beliefs on BLEEDING EDGE.
>>>>> 
>>>> 
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