Re: M&D, the people’s memory vs the internet

[John Bailey]

I read a comment somewhere recently about how soon enough there won't
be anyone alive who has direct memories of the rise of fascism in
Europe, but that history is the way we transcend individual memory. It
struck me as a novel concept, as if memory is essentially individual
while history is more like socialised memory, as Cherrycoke is
suggesting it. Of course history writing has its own politics and all
that and Pynchon is obviously wary of treating history as an objective
truth but he has described himself as being in the business of writing
historical fiction.
And these passages Smoke and Garry have posted suggest that he thinks
long and hard about time and our place in it.

On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 9:37 AM, gary webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's weird you mention that Smoke, must be that zeitgeist or something... I
> was looking for this passage in Vineland a couple weeks ago to make some
> point or another, who knows? But it relates to Cherrycoke ... "Frenesi
> Margaret, Zoyd Herbert, will you, for real, in trouble or in trippiness,
> promise to remain always on the groovy high known as Love," and so forth,
> it may have been over in half a minute, there were few if any timepieces
> among those assembled, and nobody seemed restless, this after all being the
> Mellow Sixties, a slower moving time, predigital, not yet so cut to pieces,
> not even by television (pg.38)."
>
> For whatever reason, I guess it was a conversation or current events that
> forced that particular passage into my mind, and I had to do some digging
> in the novel to find it. It's not particularly profound or important to the
> novel, but Zoyd is no doubt remembering, and the passage is colored by the
> contours of his memory... It also illustrates the transition that was
> happening at the time, as the 1960s/70s were a time where societies were
> transitioning from an analog to a digital world... This process took time
> to work itself out, and was still ongoing in the temporal setting of
> Vineland, circa 1984. These is this interesting passage from Frenesi,
> "...to ignore history and the dead, to imagine no future, no yet-to-be
> born, to be able to simply go on defining moments only, purely, by the
> action that filled them. Here was a world of simplicity and certainty no
> acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the
> one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of lives
> and deaths... (pg.71)."
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 1:47 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Memory, Cherrycoke tells us, belongs to the people.
>>
>> Anyone have any thoughts on how the internet, the right to be forgotten,
>> and/or Bleeding Edge play into this?
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l