vector of desire M&D random

[Mark Kohut]

Well, mid-nineteenth is right on....vector in mathematics goes back to 1868
says Mr OED (the Organized Horse....Mr Ed was a horse, of course, of
course, etc)....but then another citation, perhaps closer to P's use here
from 1881...and that use is from
Maxwell, someone we can think TRP might have directly read some of, given
his famous demon knowledge (and in a work of cultural history a writer
attributes to Maxwell the
notions that most overthrew the nineteenth century scientific world mental
order)....

On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 1:41 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> "In the Principia, Newton dealt extensively with what are now considered
> vectorial entities (e.g., velocity, force), but never the concept of a
> vector. The systematic study and use of vectors were a 19th and early 20th
> century phenomenon."
>
> http://www.math.mcgill.ca/labute/courses/133f03/VectorHistory.html
>
> "vector" here strikes me as one of P's deliberate anachronisms.
> Mathematicians didn't formally define it until the mid-19th century.
> Although the idea of a directed quantity would have made sense to
> mathematicians and astronomers after Descartes and Newton, it's unlikely
> that in the 1780s DePugh -- even as a Cambridge student with "an early
> aptitude with Figures" -- would have come up with that word so readily in
> this context, or been understood so readily by the Rev'd Cherrycoke. Does
> anyone have the OED handy for earliest citations in astronomy?
>
> That said, note the "as if" simile of *projection* here: Cherrycoke
> suggests that the telescope transports us "to the Object we wish to
> examine." Maybe even a hint of the very old idea -- abandoned in science by
> M&D's time -- that vision entails something emitted from the eye?
>
> On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 12:19 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>> random
>>  pg 96 Vector of desire. An astronomy term? Lacan? Other reader's
>> thoughts, insights.
>>
>> CH 10 CherryCoke is much more interesting to me this time around. His
>> quote fom his unpublished Sermons is rather lovely, comparing our sense of
>> the Divine to the earth’s sense of relation to the sun. Very Gaia
>> hypothesis kind of thing.
>>  We see that the adult component of the listeners coming to hear Ccoke is
>> growing. He is getting a bit of flak from them. Is P describing a process
>> where he, in a satiric mode, champions the marginal, the colonized, and the
>> youn upstarts of his generation like Richard Farina who have questioned the
>> wars and the demonization of Cuba , drawing them and the literary avant
>> garde first as an audience, and then attracts those who want to modify the
>> radical aspects of his satire? Because Ccoke is also a satirist, an
>> irreverent reverend feeding salacious stories of real life to the young,
>> but also critiquing Clairol culture, and Calvinism and connecting it to
>> racial abuse among many other humorous cultural obs.
>>
>> Not many people joining in the M&D  discussion. Everyone is busy and it
>> is a big, cumbersome book. Let’s make sure this is a safe place for
>> newbies, and disagreement.  The structure is loose but  just join in and
>> see what happens.
>>
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20180108/47bd9f93/attachment.html>