"The White Plague" & Mumford and the Slothrop Paper Company

[Jemmy Bloocher]

I love this, it flows like fiction. I had to check that it isn't as I
hadn't heard of it before. Beautiful. Plioo?

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 12:39 PM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_00bbE9oxQ
>
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 6:26 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > from Mumford's _The City in History_
> >
> > To believe, therefore, that human culture has reached a marvelous final
> culmination in the modern metropolis one must avert one‘s eyes from the
> grim details of the daily routine. And that is precisely what the
> metropolitan denizen schools himself to do: he lives, not in the real
> world, but in a shadow world projected around him at every moment by means
> of paper and celluloid and adroitly manipulated lights: a world in which he
> is insulated by glass, cellophane and film from the mortifications of
> living. In short, a world of professional illusionists and their credulous
> victims.
> >
> > The swish and crackle of paper is the underlying sound of the
> metropolis. What is visible and real in this world is only what has been
> transferred to paper or has been even further etherialised on a microfilm
> or a tape recorder. The essential daily gossip of the metropolis is no
> longer that of people meeting face to face at a cross-roads, at the dinner,
> table, in the marketplace: a few dozen people writing in the newspapers, a
> dozen or so more broadcasting over radio and television, provide the daily
> interpretation of movements and happenings with slick professional
> adroitness. Thus. even the most spontaneous human activities come under
> professional surveillance and centralized control. The spread of
> manifolding devices of every sort gives to the most ephemeral and mediocre
> products of the mind a temporary durability they do not deserve: whole
> books are printed to justify the loose evacuations of the tape recorder.
> >
> > All the major activities of the metropolis are directly connected with
> paper and its plastic substitutes; and printing and packaging are among its
> principal industries. The activities pursued in the offices of the
> metropolis are directly connected with paper: the tabulating machines, the
> journals, the ledgers, the card-catalogues, the deeds, the contracts, the
> mortgages, the briefs, the trial records: so, to, plioo, the prospectuses,
> the advertisements, the magazines, the newspapers. As early as the
> eighteenth century Mercier had observed this metropolitan form of the White
> Plague. Modern methods of manifolding have not lessened the disease: they
> have only exchanged easygoing slipshod ways, which often sufficed, for a
> more exact record, whose elaboration and cost are out of all proportion to
> the value of what is recorded. What was a mere trickle in Mercier’s day has
> now becoming a ravaging flood of paper.
> >
> > As the day’s routine proceeds the pile of paper mounts higher: the
> trashbaskets are filled and emptied and filled again. The ticker tape
> exudes its quotation of stocks and its report of news; the students in the
> schools and universities fill their notebooks, digest and disgorge the
> contents of books, as the silkworm feeds on mulberry leaves and
> manufactures its cocoon, unraveling themselves on examination day. In the
> theatre, in literature, in music, in business, reputations are made on
> paper. The scholar with his degrees and publications, the actress with her
> newspaper clippings, and the financier with his shares and his voting
> proxies, measure their power and importance by the amount of paper they can
> command. No wonder the anarchists once invented the grim phrase:
> ‘Incinerate the documents!’ That would ruin this whole world quicker than
> universal flood or earthquake, if not as fatally as a shower of hydrogen
> bombs. That life is an occasion for living, and not a pretext for supplying
> items to newspapers, interviews on television, or a Spectacle for crowds of
> otherwise vacant bystanders these notions do not occur in the metropolitan
> mind. For them the Show is the reality, and ‘ the show must go on!’ This
> metropolitan world, then, is a world where tears and blood are less real
> than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of
> people, unable to achieve a more fullbodied and satisfying means of living,
> take life vicariously, as leaders, spectators, listeners, passive
> observers. Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from
> the nature that is outside them, and no less remote from the nature that is
> within, it is no wonder that they turn more and more of the functions of
> life, even thought itself, to the machines that their inventors have
> created. In this disordered environment only machines retain some of the
> attributes of life, while human beings are progressively reduced to a
> bundle of reflexes, without self-starting impulses or autonomous goals:
> ‘behaviourist man’.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>